


Parasitic Commensalism

by Eva_Shogoki



Category: Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins Movies), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Genre: Angst, I don't know how Dr. Lector escapes Chesapeake either, Infantilizing Will Graham, Just skip if you get bored, M/M, Romanticizing everything, Slow Burn, Things only escalate until the end, Will Graham suffering
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2019-10-11 00:52:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 40,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17436752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eva_Shogoki/pseuds/Eva_Shogoki
Summary: Hannibal and Francis hatch a ploy to have fun with Will.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BEFORE YOU READ:  
> Warning! This fic is a remix of the original novel, "Red Dragon" by author Thomas Harris. I tweaked it and added my own bits to make it more Will-centered and dramatic. I changed dialogue and plot points in "Red Dragon" and then created a new ending. Please be aware that this will have elements of the movie "Red Dragon". I'll probably quote from other pieces in the Hannibal Lecter tetralogy and the TV series "Hannibal". Thank you for understanding! Everything belongs to Thomas Harris!

Will Graham sat Jack Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea, Crawford looked at the pleasant old house, salt-silvered wood in the clear light.

"I should have caught you in Marathon when you got off work," he said. "You don't want to talk about it here."

Graham bowed his head and stayed silent, the receding sunlight hit his bangs, shadowing his face in a cradle of golden hay. Crawford looked back, his gaze expectant.

Their silence was filled with the sounds of the sea and distant traffic.

Finally, Graham spoke, his voice weary and soft: "I don't want to talk about it anywhere, Jack. If you've got to talk about it, then let's have it...Just don't get out any pictures, leave them in the briefcase...Molly and Josh will be back soon."

"Well, " Crawford sighed and combed back his hair, "how much do you know?"

"Whatever was in the Miami Herald and the Times," Graham said. "Two families killed in their houses a month apart. Birmingham and Atlanta. The circumstances were similar."

"Not similar. The same."

"How many confessions so far?"

Crawford observed Graham before answering. The lashes that obscured his downcast eyes fluttered for the breeze. The corners of his mouth were strained and they twitched. 

"Eighty-six when I called in this afternoon," Crawford sipped his tea quietly. "Cranks. None of them knew details. He smashes the mirrors and uses the pieces. None of them knew that."

"What else did you keep out of the papers?"

"He's blond, right-handed and really strong, wears a size-eleven shoe. He can tie a bowline. The prints are all smooth gloves."

Graham's made a face. "You said that in a press conference." 

"He's not too comfortable with locks," Crawford retorted. "Used a glass cutter and a suction cup to get in the house last time. Oh, and his blood's AB positive."

"Was he injured?"

"Not that we know of. We typed him from semen and saliva."

"Christ..." Graham slumped back into his chair and rubbed at his eyes.

Crawford looked out at the flat sea. "Will, I want to ask you something. You saw this in the papers. The second one was all over the TV. Did you ever think about giving me a call?" He turned back to Graham. "Why not?"

Hands still over his eyes, Graham replied: "There weren't many details at first on the one in Birmingham. It could have been anything- revenge, a relative."

"But after the second one, you knew what it was."

"Yeah. A psychopath. I didn't call you because I didn't need to. I know who you have already to work on this. You've got the best lab. You'd have Heimlich at Harvard, Bloom at the University of Chicago-"

"And I've got you down here fixing bloody boat motors."

Graham gave a rare smile, a thin line that didn't reach his eyes. "I don't think I'd be all that useful to you, Jack. I never think about it anymore."

"Really? You caught two. The last two we had, you caught."

"How? By doing the same things you and the rest of them are doing."

"That's not entirely true, Will. It's the way you think."

"I think there's been a lot of bullshit about the way I think."

"You made some jumps you never explained."

"The evidence was there," Graham said.

Crawford smiled now, he had successfully eased into harmless banter. "Sure. Sure there was. Plenty of it- afterward. Before the collar there was so damn little we couldn't get probable cause to go in."

"You have the people you need, Jack. I don't think I'd be an improvement. I came down here to get away from that."

"I know it. You got cut last time. But now you look all right."

"I'm all right. It's not about getting cut. You've been hurt."

"I have, but not like that."

"It's not that. I just decided to stop. I don't think I can explain it, I don't want to have to do it again."

"If you couldn't look at it anymore, God knows I'd understand that."

"No. You know having to look. It's always bad, but you get so you can function anyway, as long as they're dead. The hospital, interviews, that's worse. You have to shake it off and keep on thinking. I don't believe I can do it now. I can make myself look, but I'd shut down the thinking."

"Is it your nightmares?"

Graham did not answer.

They sat in silence again and watched the sunset on a watery horizon.

Once again, Jack Crawford heard the rhythm and syntax of his own speech in Graham's voice. He had heard Graham do that before, with other people.   
Often, Graham would tell you what was sitting in your head, or ask a question you wanted to ask. At first, Crawford had thought he was doing it deliberately, that they were gimmicks to maintain the upper hand.

Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tries to stop and can't.

"These are all dead, Will," Crawford said as kindly as he could. He dipped into his jacket pocket with two fingers. Then flipped two photographs across the table, face up. "All dead," he said.

Graham stared at him in momentary disbelief. What Crawford was doing was, by all means, very predictable; shocking nonetheless. 

Graham slowly picked up the pictures. 

They were only snapshots: A woman, followed by three children and a puppy, carried picnic items up to the bank of a pond. A family stood behind a cake.

After half a minute he put the photographs down again. He pushed them into a stack with his finger and looked far down the beach where a boy hunkered, examining something in the sand. Molly stood watching, a hand on her hip.

Graham, ignoring his guest, watched the two for as long as he had looked at the pictures.

Crawford was pleased. He kept the satisfaction out of his face with the same care he had used to choose the site of this conversation. He's playing Graham well, and there was something twisted with the delight he felt.

Suddenly, three remarkably ugly dogs appeared; they wandered in circles and flopped to the ground around the table.

"My God," Crawford said.

"These are probably dogs," Graham explained. "People dump small ones here all the time. I can give away the cute ones. The rest stay around and get big with Josh."

"They're fat enough." Crawford nudged one away with his foot. "You've got a nice life here, Will. Molly and the boy, Josh. How old is he?"

"Eleven."

"Good-looking kid. He's going to be taller than you."

Graham nodded. "His father was. I'm lucky here. I know that."

"I wanted to bring Bella down here. Florida. Get a place when I retire, and stop living like a cave fish. She says all her friends are in Arlington."

"I meant to thank her for the books she brought me in the hospital, but I never did. Tell her for me."

"I'll tell her."

A bright butterfly lit on the table, it flew around Graham, Crawford watched the thing bounce around and felt a surge of guilt.

"Will, this freak seems to be in phase with the moon. He killed the Jacobis in Birmingham on Saturday night, June 28th, full moon. He killed the Leeds family in Atlanta night before last, July 26th. That's one day short of a lunar month. So if we're lucky we may have a little over three weeks before he does it again." He cleared his throat.   
"I don't think you want to wait here in the Keys and read about the next one in your Miami Herald. Hell, I'm not the pope, I'm not saying what you ought to do, but I want to ask you, do you respect my judgment, Will?"

Crawford waited, he knew it was inevitable.

"Yes."

"I think we have a better chance to get him fast if you help. Hell, Will, saddle up and help us. Go to Atlanta and Birmingham and look, then come on to Washington. Just TDY."

Graham did not answer. 

Crawford waited for five waves to lap the beach. Then he got up and slung his suit coat over his shoulder. It was time to retreat, the man needed to cook. 

"Let's talk after dinner."

"Stay and eat."

Crawford shook his head. "I'll come back later. There'll be messages at the Holiday Inn and I'll be a while on the phone. Tell Molly thanks, though."

Crawford's rented car raised thin dust that settled on the bushes beside the shell road.

Graham returned to the table. He was afraid that this was how he would remember the end of Sugarloaf Key- ice melting in two tea glasses and paper napkins fluttering off the redwood table in the breeze and Molly and Josh far down the beach.


	2. Chapter 2

Sunset on Sugarloaf, the herons still and the red sun waned. Will Graham and Molly Foster Graham sat on a bleached drift log, she picked up his hand, his eyes were mint marbles in the sunset, his back a violet shadow.

"Crawford stopped by to see me at the shop before he came out here," she said. "He asked directions to the house. I tried to call you. You really ought to answer the phone once in a while."

"What else did he ask you?"

"How you were."

"And you said?"

"I said you're fine and he should leave you the hell alone. What does he want you to do?"

"Look at the evidence. I'm a forensic specialist, Molly. You've seen my diploma."

"You mended a crack in the ceiling paper with your diploma, I saw that." She straddled the log to face him. "If you missed your other life, what you used to do, I think you'd talk about it. You never do. You're happy and calm and easy now. I love that."

Graham turned away with an air of shame. Then he began, hoarsely: "...We had a good time, right?"

Molly gasped, silently. She knew that whatever Jack Crawford had fed him, it's now eating away.

"What you did for Crawford was bad for you. He has a lot of other people- the whole goddamn government! Why can't he leave us alone?" Molly gave him a single styptic blink, she sounded afraid.

"He was my supervisor the two times I left the FBI Academy to go back to the field. Those two cases were the only ones like this he ever had, and Jack's been working a long time. Now he's got a new one. This kind of psychopath is very rare. He knows I've had...experience."

"Yes, you have," Molly said.

His shirt was too big and she could see the looping scar. It was pinky width, it raised, and never tanned. It ran down from his right hipbone and turned up to notch his rib cage on the other side.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter did that. He did it with a linoleum knife. It happened a year before Molly met Graham, and it very nearly disembowelled him. 

Dr. Lecter, known in the tabloids as "Hannibal the Cannibal," was the second psychopath Graham had caught, a feat that cost half his life.

When he finally got out of the hospital, Graham resigned from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, left Washington and found a job as a diesel mechanic in the boatyard at Marathon in the Florida Keys. It was a trade he grew up with. He slept and drank in a trailer at the boatyard until Molly came and whisked him away to her good ramshackle house on Sugarloaf Key.

Now he straddled the drift log and held both her hands.

"All right, Molly. Crawford thinks I have a knack for the monsters. It's like a superstition with him."

"Do you believe it?"

Graham watched three pelicans fly in-line across the tidal flats. 

"...Molly, an intelligent psychopath- particularly a sadist- is hard to catch for several reasons...First, there's no traceable motive. So you can't go that way. And most of the time you won't have any help from informants. See, there's a lot more stooling than sleuthing behind most arrests, but in a case like this, there won't be any informants. He may not even know that he's doing it. So you have to take whatever evidence you have and extrapolate...I reconstruct his thinking. I try to find patterns."

"Then follow him and find him," Molly said. "I'm afraid if you go after this maniac, or whatever he is- I fear that he'll do you in. That's it. That's what scares me."

"He'll never see me or know my name, Molly. The police, they'll have to take him down if they can find him, not me. Crawford just wants another point of view."

She watched the red sun melt into the sea, Graham could see the pulse in her throat. He swallowed and said, "What the hell can I do?"

"What you've already decided. If you stay here and there's more killing, maybe it would sour this place for you. High Noon and all that crap. If it's that way, you weren't really asking."

"If I were asking, what would you say?"

"Stay here with me. Me. Me. Me. And Josh, I'd drag him in if it would do any good. I'm supposed to dry my eyes and wave my hanky. If things don't go so well, I'll have the satisfaction that you did the right thing. That'll last about as long as taps. I love you Will, please don't go."

"I'd be at the back of the pack."

"I don't care. It's keen and sweet here. All the things that happened to you before made you know it. Value it, I mean."

Graham nodded.

Darkness fell quickly and they walked back to the house beside the rising gibbous moon. Far out past the tidal flats, baitfish leaped for their lives.  
~~~~~~  
Crawford came back after dinner, carrying a single merlot. he had taken off his coat and tie and rolled up his sleeves for the casual effect.

Molly despised Crawford's demeanour, he treated Graham like a pet, his protege hound. A mixture of superiority and control. To her, Crawford was a manipulative man with selfish intentions. 

She served him coffee under the porch fan and sat with him while Graham and Josh went out to feed the dogs. She said nothing. 

Moths batted softly at the screens.

"He looks good, Molly," Crawford remarked. "You both do- Graham's a bit thin though."

"Whatever I say, you'll take him anyway, won't you?"

"Yeah. I have to. I have to do it. But I swear to God, Molly, I'll make it as easy on him as I can. He's changed. It's great you all got married."

"He's better and better. He has fewer nightmares now. He was really obsessed with the dogs for a while. Now he just takes good care of them; he doesn't talk about...that stuff anymore. You're his friend, Jack. Why can't you leave him alone?"

"Because it's his bad luck to be the best. Because he doesn't think like other people. Somehow he never got in a rut."

"He thinks you want him to look at the evidence."

"I do want him to look at the evidence. There's nobody better with evidence. But he has the other thing too. Imagination, projection, whatever. Bloom called him an eidetic. He doesn't like that part of it though."

"You wouldn't like it either if you had it," Molly turned towards Crawford, she was weeping. "Promise me something, Jack. Promise me you'll see to it he doesn't get too close. I think it would kill him to have to fight again."

"He won't have to fight. I can promise you that."

That night, after Graham finished tucking Willy in, Molly cleaned the dog pen vigorously and didn't help him pack.


	3. Chapter 3

Will Graham drove slowly past the house where the Leeds family had lived and died. 

He parked two blocks away and walked back through the warm night, carrying the Atlanta police detectives' report in a cardboard box.

Graham had insisted on coming alone. Anyone else in the house would distract him- that was the reason he gave Crawford. He had another, private reason: he was not sure how he would act. He didn't want a face aimed at him all the time.

He had been all right at the morgue.

The two-story brick home was set back from the street on a wooded lot. Graham stood under the trees for a long time looking at it. He tried to be still inside. In his mind, a cold thing crawled in darkness. He waited until the creature rested.

The door from the porch into the kitchen was patched with plywood where the police had taken out the glass. By flashlight, he unlocked it with the key the police had given him.   
He wanted to turn on lights. He wanted to put on his shiny badge and make some official noises to justify himself to the silent house where five people had died. He did none of that. He went into the dark kitchen and sat down at the breakfast table.

Two pilot lights on the kitchen range glowed blue in the dark. He smelled furniture polish and apples.

The thermostat clicked and the air conditioning came on. Graham started at the noise and felt a trickle of fear; but fear was an old buddy. He could manage this one. He simply was afraid, he could go on anyway. He could see and hear better afraid; he could not speak as concisely, and fear sometimes made him deluded and mousey. But here, there was nobody left to speak to, nobody to scare.

Madness came into this house through that door into this kitchen, moving on size eleven feet. Sitting in the dark, he sensed madness like a bloodhound sniffs a shirt.

Graham had studied the detectives' report at Atlanta Homicide for most of the day and early evening. He remembered that the light on the vent hood over the stove had been on when the police arrived. He turned it on now.

Graham looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty P.M. According to the pathologist, the deaths occurred between eleven P.M. and one A.M. He ate two Di-Gels. The crackle of the cellophane irritated him as he stuffed it in his pocket, it was always accompanied by a scolding Molly. He walked through the living room, holding a flashlight against his waist.

Now he stood in the doorway of the master bedroom. Coppery blood washed over him.

Eyes accustomed to the dark could see well enough. The madman could distinguish Mr. Leeds from his wife. There was enough light for him to cross the room, grab Leeds's hair and cut his throat. What then? Back to the wall switch, a greeting to Mrs. Leeds and then the gunshot that disabled her?

Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He shook from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.

Graham knelt on the floor, eyes closed until his head was quiet. Stop crawling, still, be still.

The number and variety of the bloodstains had puzzled Atlanta detectives trying to reconstruct the crime. All the victims were found slain in their beds. This was not consistent with the locations of the stains. At first, they believed Charles Leeds was attacked in his daughter's room and his body dragged to the master bedroom. Close examination of the splash patterns made them reconsider. The killer's exact movements in the rooms were not yet determined. Now, with the advantage of the autopsy and lab reports, Will Graham began to see how it had happened.

The intruder cut Charles Leeds's throat as he lay asleep beside his wife, went back to the wall switch and turned on the light- hairs and oil from Mr. Leeds's head were left on the switchplate by a smooth glove. He shot Mrs. Leeds as she was rising, then went toward the children's rooms.

Then suddenly, Graham was Charles Leeds, Graham rose with his cutthroat and tried to protect the children, losing great gouts of blood and leaving an unmistakable arterial spray as he tried to fight.  
His vision red, then alarming darkness. He was shoved, contact with the frame of the bed. Graham watched in sheer terror as a gloved hand reached toward him and took ahold of his hair. two quick slams on a wooden column. The children screamed to the dull thunks. Graham fell and died with his daughter in her room.

One of the two boys was shot in his bed. The other boy was also found in bed, but he had dust balls in his hair. Police believed he was dragged out from under his bed to be shot.

When all of them were dead, except possibly Mrs. Leeds, the smashing of mirrors began, the selection of shards, the further attention to Mrs. Leeds.

Graham had full copies of all the autopsy protocols in his box. Here was the one on Mrs. Leeds. The bullet entered to the right of her navel and lodged into her lumbar spine, but she died of strangulation. The increase in serotonin and free histamine levels in the gunshot wound indicated she had lived at least five minutes after she was shot. The histamine was much higher than the serotonin, so she had not lived for more than fifteen minutes. Most of her other injuries were probably, but not conclusively, postmortem.

Now Graham was lying in the bed, bleeding out. He was in shock but could feel the burning bile from an obliterated pancreas. Three distinct shots sounded somewhere, they were deafening, but Graham could not find the energy to worry. Then there was silence. Before a brisk stroll...that stopped beside him.  
Breathing, closer now.  
A gentle finger on his neck.  
Two hands.  
Tightening and releasing, tightening- ...release.

Graham shook now, uncontrollably. Goddamnit Jack.

Graham dug for diazepam and wondered: If the other injuries were postmortem, what was the killer doing in the interval while Mrs. Leeds waited to die? Struggling with Leeds and killing the others, yes, but that would have taken less than a minute. Smashing the mirrors. But what else?

The Atlanta detectives were thorough. They had measured and photographed exhaustively, had vacuumed and grid-searched and taken the traps from the drains. Still, Graham looked for himself.

From the police photographs and taped outlines on the mattresses, Graham could see where the bodies had been found. Nitrate traces on bedclothes in the case of the gunshot wounds- indicated that they were found in positions approximating those in which they died.

But the profusion of bloodstains and matted sliding marks on the hall carpet remained unexplained. Graham saw children crawling away from the killer. No, that wasn't it- clearly, the killer moved them after they were dead and then put them back the way they were when he killed them.

What he did with Mrs. Leeds after her death was obvious. But what about the others? What did the killer do with them after they were dead?

He went over the upstairs rooms minutely, trying to match injuries to stains, trying to work backward. There was a row of three bloodstains slanting up and around a corner of the bedroom wall. Here were three faint stains on the carpet beneath them. The wall above the headboard on Charles Leeds' side of the bed was bloodstained, and there were swipes along the baseboards. Graham's field sketch began to look like a join-the-'lots puzzle with no numbers. He stared at it, looked up at the room and back to the sketch until his head ached.

He went into the bathroom and took the last two Bufferin in his med pack, scooping up water in his hand from the faucet in the sink. He splashed water on his face and dried it with his shirttail. Water spilled on the floor. He had forgotten that the trap was gone from the drain. Otherwise, the bathroom was undisturbed, except for the broken mirror and traces of the red fingerprint powder called Dragon's Blood. Toothbrushes, facial cream, razor, were all in place. Mrs. Leeds's small, homey economy pierced him painfully.

Graham stood looking at the bed for a while before climbing out a window onto the porch roof. He sat on the gritty shingles. hugging his knees, the collar of his dress-shirt raised to graze his ears; he sniffed at the brisk air around him until the smell of slaughter was out of his nose.

The lights of Atlanta rusted the night sky and the stars were hard to see. The night would be clear in the Keys. He could be watching shooting stars with Molly and Josh, listening for the whoosh they agreed a shooting star must make. The Delta Aquarid meteor shower was at its maximum, and Josh was up for it.

He shivered and sniffed again. He did not want to think of Molly now. To do so was tasteless as well as distracting.

Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress.

His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his immoral associations, appalled at his macabre dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there never exists a sanctuary for what he loves.

His notions came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking.

He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, this brilliant system feasted upon his fear, it hurt him, but in return, it gave answers. It was parasitic commensalism.

Graham turned off the lights in the Leeds house and went out through the kitchen. At the far end of the back porch, his flashlight revealed a bicycle and a wicker dog bed. There was a doghouse in the backyard, a dog bowl by the steps.

The evidence indicated the Leedses were surprised in their sleep. Holding the flashlight between his chin and chest, he wrote a memo: Jack, where was the dog?


	4. Chapter 4

Graham drove back to his hotel. He had to concentrate on his driving, though there was little traffic at four-thirty A.M. His head still ached and he watched for an all-night pharmacy.

He found one on Main street. A slovenly rent-a-cop dozed near the door. The pharmacist sold Graham Bufferin. The glare in the place was painful.

"What else?" the pharmacist had said, his fingers poised above the cash register keys.

"What else?" Graham repeated again and again. "What else now?"

The Atlanta FBI office had booked him into an absurd hotel near the city's new Peachtree Center. Graham carried a single suitcase that consisted of shirts, slacks and undergarments; the only items in his Florida wardrobe fit for the FBI. He would have to borrow a formal suit from Jack. 

After riding up to his room with weak legs, Graham put his cardboard box on the dresser in his room. Then he put it in a drawer where he could not see it. He had had enough of the wide-eyed dead.

A meeting was scheduled for eight A.M. at the Atlanta police headquarters. He'd have little enough to tell them.

He would try to sleep. His mind was a busy hive, parts of it marvelled at his own obscene notions. He was numb and empty and whiskey was in his bathroom glass before he even sat down.   
Graham faintly remembered that he had to call Molly before gulping.  
~~~~~~  
Lines from the autopsy protocols sounded in his own voice, though he had never read them aloud: "...A trace of talcum on the lower right leg. Fracture of the medial orbit wall owing to insertion of mirror shard..."

Graham tried to think about the beach at Sugarloaf Key, he tried to hear the waves. He pictured his workbench in his mind, watching the sunrise with his dogs, spent waves creaming around them. He hummed something under his breath and tried to remember what it was. He couldn't, it was Jack's music. Jack had tried to talk about...and finally, he dozed.

Graham woke in an hour, rigid and terrified, the other pillow silhouetted against the bathroom light and it was Mrs. Leeds lying beside him bitten and torn, mirrored eyes and blood like the legs of spiders over her temples and ears. He could not turn his head to face her. Brain screaming like a smoke alarm, his hand trembled over there and touched dry cloth.

Having acted, Graham felt some immediate relief. He rose, his heart pounding, He could not move over to the other side of the bed. Instead, he propped a pillow against the headboard and slouched with a stiff drink in his hand. He swallowed a third of it on the first swig.

He reached for something to think about, anything. Then the parasites covered foreground and Lecter appeared. Why?

Perhaps because all he can think about was Molly and Josh dead and bloody...With mirrors in- no. Something else.

Graham closed his hand against his abdomen and accepted his fate.

He could remember when he first met Dr. Lecter. Even after spending a month in the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital. There was still a noticeable decline in Graham's work ethic at the FBI.

Graham vaguely remembers Jack's frustration, he was numb at the time, more than now; so, Crawford took matters into his own hands and referred Graham to a renowned psychiatrist in Baltimore. Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

In the whole of 1975, Lecter appeared as two characters in his life, the psychotic serial killer Graham was after, and the kind doctor that enlighted him through his pursuit of "the Chesapeake Ripper".

Everything was about amusement with him, all of their sessions were just a sick game. Graham downed his drink until his nose hurt and his eyes misted.

Now his mind drifted towards one of those sessions...A nippy November noon; Lecter had told Graham about one of his younger patients, Lecter told Graham that she found him similar to a Kewpie doll, he then continued to explain, through Graham's light laughter, that she thought his eyes identical to those of a doll's.

Graham observed the doctor afterwards, he soon saw the resemblance. Graham could always feel the focus of his attention, the doctor's concentrated gaze made his face tingle.

Graham poured himself another glass.

Lecter staring.

He started to take another sip, gasped, and then choked. Wiping at his mouth, Graham fumbled for the bedside lamp and fetched his box from the dresser drawer. He took out the autopsy protocols of the three Leeds children and his measured field sketches of the master bedroom, spreading them on the bed.

Here were the three bloodstains slanting up the corner, and here were the matching stains on the carpet. Here were the dimensions of the three children. Brother, sister, big brother. Match. Match. Match.

They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience. And Leeds. Tied around the chest to the headboard. Composed to look as though he were sitting up in bed. Getting the ligature mark, staining the wall above the headboard.

What were they watching? Nothing; they were all dead. But their eyes were open. They were watching a performance starring the madman and the body of Mrs. Leeds, beside Mr. Leeds in the bed. An audience. The crazy could look around at their faces.

Graham bit his lip hard and wondered if he had lit a candle. The flickering light would simulate expression on their faces. No candle was found. Maybe he would think to do that next time...

This first small bond to the killer itched and stung, Graham knew that Hannibal would work.

Graham sat dazed. Upon realizing that he had drawn blood, Graham resorted to biting the sheets, thinking.

Why did you move them again? Why didn't you leave them that way?

There's something you don't want me to know about you. Why?

Is there something you're ashamed of. Or is it something you can't afford for me to know?

Did you open their eyes?

Mrs. Leeds was lovely, wasn't she?

You turned on the light after you cut his throat so Mrs. Leeds could watch him flop, didn't you? It was maddening to have to wear gloves when you touched her, wasn't it?

There was talcum on her leg.

There was no talcum in the bathroom.

Someone else seemed to speak those two facts in a flat voice.

You took off your gloves, didn't you?

The powder came out of a rubber glove as you pulled it off to touch her, didn't it, YOU MONSTER?

You touched her with your bare hands and then you put the gloves back on and you wiped her down. But while the gloves were off, DID YOU OPEN THEIR EYES?  
~~~~~~  
Jack Crawford answered his telephone on the fifth ring. He had answered the telephone in the night many times and he was not confused.

"Jack, this-"

"Yes, Will."

"Is Price still in Latent Prints?"

"Yeah. He doesn't go out much anymore. He's working on the single-print index."

"I think he has to come to Atlanta."

"Why? You said yourself the guy down here is good."

"He is good, but not as good as Price."

"What do you want him to do? Where would he look?"

"Mrs. Leeds' fingernails and toenails. They're painted, it's a slick surface. And the corners of all their eyes. I think he took his gloves off, Jack."

"Jesus, Price'll have to gun it," Crawford said. "The funeral's this afternoon."


	5. Chapter 5

"I think he had to touch her," Graham said in greeting.

Crawford handed him canned coffee from a machine in the Atlanta police headquarters. It was seven-fifty A.M and Graham looked about ready to drop.

"Sure, he moved her around," Crawford said. "There were grip marks on her wrists and behind her knees. But every print in the place is from nonporous gloves. Don't worry, Price is here. Grouchy old bastard. He's on his way to the funeral home now. The morgue released the bodies last night, but the funeral home's not doing anything yet. You look bushed. Did you get any sleep?"

"Maybe an hour. I think he had to touch her with his hands."

"I hope you're right, but the Atlanta lab swears he wore surgeon's gloves the whole time," Crawford said. "The mirror pieces had those smooth prints. Forefinger on the back of the piece wedged in the socket, smudged thumb on the front."

"He polished it after he placed it, so he could see his face there," Graham said.

"The one in her mouth was obscured with blood. He never took the gloves off."

"Mrs. Leeds was a good-looking woman," Graham said. "You've seen the family pictures, right? I'd want to touch her skin in an intimate situation, wouldn't you?"

"Intimate?" Distaste sounded in Crawford's voice before he could stop it. Suddenly he was busy rummaging in his pockets for change.

"Intimate- they had privacy. Everybody else was dead. He could have their eyes open or shut, however, he liked."

"Any way he liked," Crawford said. "They tried her skin for prints, of course. Nothing. They did get a hand spread off her neck."

"The report didn't say anything about dusting nails."

"I expect her fingernails were smudged when they took scrapings. The scrapings were just where she cut her palms with them. She never scratched him."

"She had pretty feet," Graham spoke before he could shut up.

"Umm-hmm. Let's head upstairs," Crawford said. "The troops are about to muster."  
~~~~~~  
The morning briefing of police detectives on the Leeds case was concerned mostly with teeth.

Atlanta Chief of Detectives R. J. (Buddy) Springfield, a burly man in shirtsleeves, stood by the door with Dr. Dominic Prince as twenty-three detectives filed in.

"All right, boys, let's have the big grin as you come by," Springfield said. "Show Dr. Prince your teeth. That's right, let's see 'em all."

A large frontal view of a set of teeth, upper and lower, was tacked to the bulletin board at the front of the squad room. It reminded Graham of dogs; Christ, he missed the dogs.  
He and Crawford sat on armchairs at the back of the room while the detectives took their places at schoolroom desks.

Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner Gilbert Lewis and his public-relations officer sat apart from them in folding chairs. Lewis had to face a news conference in an hour.

Chief of Detectives Springfield took charge. "All right, this time we've got something for you to show around. Dr. Prince?"

Dr. Dominic Prince, the chief medical examiner for Fulton County, walked to the front and stood under the drawing of the teeth. He held up a dental cast.

"Gentlemen, this is what the subject's teeth look like. The Smithsonian in Washington reconstructed them from the impressions we took of bite marks on Mrs. Leeds and a clear bite mark in a piece of cheese from the Leeds' refrigerator," Prince said.

"As you can see, he has pegged lateral incisors- the teeth here and here." Prince pointed to the cast in his hand, then to the chart above him. "The teeth are crooked in alignment and a corner is missing from this central incisor. The other incisor is grooved, here. It looks like a 'tailor's notch,' the land of wear you get biting thread."

"Snaggletoothed son of a bitch," somebody mumbled.

"How do you know for sure it was the perpetrator that bit the cheese, Doc?" a tall detective in the front row asked.

Prince disliked being called "Doc," but he swallowed it. "Saliva washes from the cheese and from the bite wounds matched for blood type," he said. "The victims' teeth and blood type didn't match."

"Fine, Doctor," Springfield said. "We'll pass out pictures of the teeth to show around."

"What about giving it to the papers?" The public-relations officer, Simpkins, was speaking. "A 'have-you-seen-these-teeth' sort of thing."

"I see no objection to that," Springfield said. "What about it' Commissioner?"

Lewis nodded.

Simpkins was not through. "Dr. Prince, the press is going to ask why it took four days to get this dental representation you have here. And why it all had to be done in Washington."

Special Agent Crawford studied the button on his ball-point pen. Prince reddened and spluttered. "Bite marks on flesh are distorted when a body is moved, Mr. Simpson-"

"Simpkins."

"Simpkins, then," Graham spoke and Crawford turned his head so fast he cricked his neck.

"Investigator Graham?"

"Yes, sir." Graham kept his head down and his hands in his lap. "We couldn't make this using only the bite marks on the victims. That is the importance of the cheese. Cheese is relatively solid but tricky to cast. You have to oil it first to keep the moisture out of the casting medium. Usually, you get one shot at it. The Smithsonian has done it for the FBI crime lab before. They're better equipped to do a face bow registration and they have an anatomical articulator. They have a consulting forensic odontologist. We don't."

There was a silence as the whole room watched for Simpkin's reaction.

"...Then would it be fair to say that the delay was caused by the FBI lab and not here?"

Now Prince turned on him. "What it would be fair to say, Mr. Simpkins is that a federal investigator, Special Agent Crawford, found the cheese in the refrigerator two days ago- after your people had been through the place. He expedited the lab work at my request. It would be fair to say I'm relieved that it wasn't one of you that bit the goddamned thing."

Commissioner Lewis broke in, he lit a cigar as his heavy voice boomed in the squad room. "Nobody's questioning your judgment, Dr. Prince. Simpkins, the last thing we need is to start a pissing contest with the FBI. Let's get on with it."

"We're all after the same thing," Springfield said. "Jack, do you fellows want to add anything?"

Crawford took the floor. The faces directed at Graham were not entirely friendly. He had to do something about that.

"I just want to clear the air, Chief. Years ago there was a lot of rivalry about who got the collar. Each side, federal and local, held out on the other. It made a gap that crooks slipped through. That's not Bureau policy now, and it's not my policy. I don't give a damn who gets the collar. Neither does Investigator Graham. If the man who did this is run over by a garbage truck, it would suit me just fine as long as it puts him off the street. I think you feel the same way.

Crawford looked over the detectives and hoped they were mollified. He hoped they wouldn't hoard leads.

"Investigator Graham has worked on this kind of thing before." Commissioner Lewis stated.

"Yes, sir."

"Can you add anything, special investigator, suggest anything?"

Crawford raised his eyebrows at Graham.

"Would you come up to the front?" Springfield chipped in.

Graham wished he had been given the chance to talk to Springfield in private. He didn't want to go to the front. He went, though.

With a rumpled white shirt and loose suspension system, Graham didn't look like a federal investigator. Springfield thought he looked more like a sad drunk with a badge.

The detectives shifted in their seats.

When turned to face the room, his eyes were startling in contrast to his weary features, blue ice framed by a red rim and dark bags.

"Just a couple of things," he said. "We can't assume he's a former mental patient or somebody with a record of sex offences. There's a high probability that he doesn't have any kind of record. If he does, it's more likely to be breaking and entering than a minor sex offence.

The room strained to catch his faint voice.

"He may have a history of biting in lesser assaults- bar fights or child abuse. The biggest help we'll have on that will come from emergency-room personnel and the child-welfare people." 

Fumey streams of Lewis' smoke flowed towards Graham, his eyes watered. "Any bad bite they can remember is worth checking, regardless of who was bitten or how they said it happened. That's all I have."

The tall detective in the front row raised his hand and spoke at the same time.

"But he only bit women so far, right?"

"That's all we know about. He bites a lot, though. Six bad ones in Mrs. Leeds, eight in Mrs. Jacobi. That's way above average.

"What's average?"

"In a sex murder, three. He likes to bite."

"Officer, most of the time in sex assaults the bite mark has a livid spot in the center, a suction mark. These don't."

Graham frowned faintly, then continued.

"...For him biting may be a fighting pattern as much as sexual behaviour."

"Pretty thin," the detective smirked.

"It's worth checking," Graham said. "Any bite is worth checking. People lie about how it happened. Parents of a bitten child will claim an animal did it and let the child take rabies shots to cover for an abuser- you've all seen that. It's worth asking at the hospitals- who's been referred for rabies shots.

"That's all I have." Graham's legs buckled with fatigue when he sat down.

"It's worth asking, and we'll ask," Chief of Detectives Springfield said. "Now. The Safe and Loft Squad works the neighbourhood along with Larceny. Work the dog angle. You'll see the update and the picture in the file. Find out if any stranger was seen with the dog. Vice and Narcotics, take the K-Y cowboys and the leather bars after you finish the day tour. Marcus and Whitman- head up at the funeral. Do you have relatives, friends of the family, lined up to spot for you? Good. What about the photographer? All right. Turn in the funeral guest book. They've got the one from Birmingham already. The rest of the assignments are on the sheet. Let's go."  
~~~~~~  
Crawford and Graham followed Springfield after he finished his commands. Back in his office, the chief of detectives gave them coffee while Crawford checked in with the switchboard and jotted down his messages.

"I didn't get a chance to talk to you when you got here yesterday,” Springfield said to Graham. "This place has been a fucking madhouse. It's Will, right? Did the boys give you everything you need?"

"Yes, they were fine."

"We don't have shit and we know it," Springfield said. "Oh, we developed a walking picture from the footprints in the flowerbed. He was walking around bushes and stuff, so you can't tell much more than his shoe size, maybe his height. The left print's a little deeper, so he may have been carrying something. It's busywork. We did get a burglar, though, a couple of years ago, off a walking picture. Showed Parkinson's disease. Prince picked it up. No luck this time."

"You have a good crew," Graham said.

"They are. But this kind of thing is out of our usual line, thank God. Let me get it straight, do you fellows work together all the time- you and Jack and Dr. Bloom- or do you just get together for one of these?"

"...Just for these," Graham said.

"Some reunion..." Springfield swivelled his chair to face Graham, he made eye contact with Crawford before beginning: "the commissioner was saying you were the one who nailed Lecter three years ago."

Graham dropped his head and picked at his cup.

"We were all there with the Maryland police," Graham said. "The Maryland state troopers arrested him."

Springfield was bluff, not stupid. He could see that Graham was uncomfortable. He returned to his desk and picked up some notes.

"You asked about the dog. Here's the sheet on it. Last night a vet here called Leeds's brother. He had the dog. Leeds and his oldest boy brought it into the vet the afternoon before they were killed. It had a puncture wound in the abdomen. The vet operated and it's all right. He thought it was shot at first, but he didn't find a bullet. He thinks it was stabbed with something like an ice pick or an awl. We're asking the neighbours if they saw anybody fooling with the dog, and we're working the phones today checking local vets for other animal mutilations."

"Was the dog wearing a collar with the Leeds name on it?"

"No."

"Did the Jacobis in Birmingham have a pet?" Graham asked.

"We're supposed to be finding that out," Springfield said. "Hold on, let me see." He dialled an inside number. "Lieutenant Flatt is our liaison with Birmingham...Yeah, Flatt. What about the Jacobis' dog? Uh-huh...Uh-huh. Just a minute." He put his hand over the phone. "They found a litter box in the downstairs bathroom with cat droppings in it. They didn't find any cat. The neighbours are watching for it."

"Could you ask Birmingham to check around in the yard and behind any outbuildings," Graham said. "If the cat was hurt, the children might not have found it in time and they might have buried it. You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home. And would you ask if it's wearing a collar?"

"Tell them if they need a methane probe, we'll send one," Crawford said. Save a lot of digging."

Springfield relayed the request. The telephone rang as soon as he hung it up. The call was for Jack Crawford. It was Jimmy Price at the Lombard Funeral Home. Crawford punched on from the other phone.

"Jack, I got a partial that's probably a thumb and a fragment of a palm."

"Jimmy, you're the light of my life."

"I know. The partial's a tented arch, but it's smudged. I'll have to see what I can do with it when I get back. Came off the oldest kid's left eye. I never did that before. Never would have seen it, but it stood out against an eight-ball hemorrhage from the gunshot wound. Hang on to Will, Jack, Yer' pet's a treasure."

"I know that. Can you make an identification off it?"

"It's a very long shot, Jack. If he's in the single-print index, maybe, but that's like the Irish Sweepstakes, you know that. The palm came off the nail of Mrs. Leeds's left big toe. It's only good for comparison. We'll be lucky to get six points off it. The assistant SAC witnessed, and so did Lombard. He's a notary. I've got pictures in situ. that'll do it right?"

"What about elimination prints on the funeral-home employees?"

"I inked up Lombard and all his Merry Men, major case prints whether they said they had touched her or not. They're scrubbing their hands and bitching now. Let me go home, Jack. I want to work these up in my own darkroom. I can catch a plane to Washington in an hour and fax the prints down to you by early afternoon."

Crawford thought a moment. "Okay, Jimmy, but step on it. Copies to Atlanta and Birmingham PD's and Bureau offices."

"You got it. Now, something else we've got to get straight on your end."

Crawford rolled his eyes to the ceiling. "Gonna piss in my ear about the per diem, aren't you?"

"Right."

"Today, Jimmy my lad, nothing's too good for you."

Graham started out the window while Crawford told them about the prints.

"That's by God remarkable," was all Springfield said.

Graham's face was blank; flat mouth and sunk head, eyes hidden behind hair. He trailed behind a giddy Crawford and Springfield watched them all the way to the door.  
~~~~~~  
The public safety commissioner's news conference was breaking up in the foyer as Crawford and Graham left Springfield's office. The print reporters headed for the phones. Television reporters were doing "cutaways," standing alone before their cameras asking the best questions they had heard at the news conference and extending their microphones to thin air for a reply that would be spliced in later from the film of the commissioner.

Crawford and Graham had started down the front steps when a man darted ahead of them, spun and took a picture. His face popped up behind his camera.

"Will Graham!" he said. "Remember me- Freddy Lounds? I covered the Lecter case for the Tattler. I did the paperback."

"I remember," Graham said. He and Crawford continued down the steps, Lounds walking sideways ahead of them.

"When did they call you in, Will? What have you got?"

"I won't talk to you, Lounds."

"How does this guy compare with Lecter? Does he do them-"

"Stop." Graham's voice wavered and Crawford got in front of him fast. "Lounds, you write lying shit, and The National Tattler is an ass-wipe. Keep away from us."

Crawford gripped Graham's arm. "Get away, Lounds. Go on. Will, let's get some breakfast. Come on, Will." They rounded the corner, walking swiftly.

"I'm sorry, Jack. I can't stand that bastard. When I was in the hospital, he came in and-"

"I know it," Crawford said. "I reamed him out, much good it did," Crawford remembered the picture in The National Tattler at the end of the Lecter case.

Lounds had come into the hospital room while Graham was asleep. He flipped back the sheet and shot a picture of Graham's temporary colostomy. The paper ran it raw the next day. Caption was: "CRAZY GUTS COP".  
~~~~~~  
The tavern was bright and loud. Graham's hands trembled and he slopped coffee in his saucer.

He saw Crawford's cigarette smoke bothering a couple in the next booth. The couple ate in a peptic silence, their resentment hung above them with the smoke.

Two women, apparently mother and daughter, argued at a table near the door. They spoke in low voices, anger ugly in their faces. Graham could feel their rage on his face and neck.

Crawford was griping about having to testify at a trial in Washington in the morning. He was afraid the trial could tie him up for several days. As he lit another cigarette, he peered across the flame at Graham's fidgeting hands and his pasty complexion.

"Atlanta and Birmingham can run the thumbprint against their known sex offenders," Crawford said. "So can we. And Price has dug a single print out of the files before. He'll program the FINDER with it- we've come a long way with that just since you left."

FINDER, the FBI's automated fingerprint reader and processor, might recognize the thumbprint on an incoming fingerprint card from some unrelated case.

"When we get him, that print and his teeth will put him away,' Crawford said. "What we have to do, we have to figure on what he could be. We have to swing a wide loop. Indulge me, now. Say we've arrested a good suspect. You walk in and see him. What is there about him that doesn't surprise you?"

"I don't know, Jack. He's got no face for me. We could spend a lot of time looking for people we've invented. Have you talked to Bloom?"

"On the phone last night. Bloom doubts he's suicidal, and so does Heimlich. Bloom was only here a couple of hours the first day, but he and Heimlich have the whole file. Bloom's examining Ph.D. candidates this week. He said to tell you hello. Do you have his number in Chicago?"

"I have it."

Graham liked Dr. Alan Bloom, a small round man with droopy eyes, a good forensic psychiatrist- may be the best. Graham appreciated the fact that Dr. Bloom had never displayed professional interest in him. That was rarely the case with psychiatrists.

"Bloom says he wouldn't be surprised if we heard from the Tooth Fairy. He might write us a note," Crawford said.

"On a bedroom wall."

"Bloom thinks he might be disfigured or he may believe he's disfigured. He told me not to give that a lot of weight. 'I won't set up a straw man to chase, Jack,' is what he told me. 'That would be a distraction and would diffuse the effort.' Said they taught him to talk like that in graduate school."

"He's right," Graham said.

"You could tell something about him or you wouldn't have found that fingerprint," Crawford said.

"That was the evidence on the damn wall, Jack. Don't put this on me. Look, don't expect too much from me, all right?"

"Oh, we'll get him. You know we'll get him, don't you?" "I know it. One way or the other."

"What's one way?"

"We'll find evidence we've overlooked," Crawford snubbed out his smoke and leaned on his elbows. "Now you tell me another.

"...He'll do it and do it until one night he makes too much noise going in and the husband gets to a gun in time."

"No other possibilities huh?"

"Yes, Jack. The Tooth Fairy will go on and on until we get smart or get lucky. He won't stop."

"Why?"

"Because he's got a genuine taste for it."

"See, you do know something about him," Crawford said, smugly.

Graham put his head in his hands and did not speak again until they were on the sidewalk. he broke the silence when they parted.

"Wait until the next full moon," he told Crawford. "Then tell me how much I know about him."  
~~~~~~  
Graham went back to his hotel and slept for two and a half hours. He woke at noon, showered, and ordered a pot of coffee and two pears. It was time to make a close study of the Jacobi file from Birmingham. He fetched his reading glasses and settled in by the window with the file. For the first few minutes, he looked up at every sound, footsteps in the hall, the distant thud of the elevator door. Then he knew nothing but the file.

The waiter knocked and waited, knocked and waited. Finally, he left the tray on the floor outside the door and signed the bill himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for ghosting so long, I really have no excuse.


	6. Chapter 6

Graham went back to the Leeds house in the late afternoon. He entered through the front door and tried not to look at the ruin the killer had left. So far he had seen files, all aftermath. He knew a fair amount about how they died. How they lived was on his mind today.

A survey, then. The garage contained a good ski boat, well used and well maintained, and a station wagon. Golf clubs were there, and a trail bike. The power tools were almost unused...Adult toys.

Graham took a wedge from the golf bag and had to choke up on the long shaft as he made a jerky swing. The bag puffed a smell of leather at him as he leaned it back against the wall. Charles Leeds's things.

Graham pursued Charles Leeds through the house. His hunting prints hung in the den. His set of the Great Books were all in a row in the den closet. Along with a sleek revolver- Mrs. Leeds' most likely, a Nikon camera, a simple movie camera and projector.

Graham, who owned almost nothing except books, a third-hand Volkswagen, and two cases of Sauvignon, felt a mild animosity toward the everything and wondered why.

This resulted in another nauseating fall in reminiscence. 

When they first met, Graham would experience disorderly terrors, often waking up at unruly times during the night.  
Side-effects of his critical injury also affected the more...intimate parts, of his relationship. It's a wonder that Molly stuck with him through all that.

Shame dilutes within, so he distracts his stray mind.

Who was Leeds? A successful tax attorney, a Sewanee footballer, a rangy man who knew how to pleasure a women, a father, a husband who got up and fought with his throat cut.

Graham followed him through the house out of an odd sense of order, although he felt sure it was she who drew the monster, as surely as a singing cricket attracts death from the red-eyed fly.

Mrs. Leeds, then.

She had a small dressing room upstairs. The room was yellow and appeared undisturbed except for the smashed mirror above the dressing table. Her dressing gown appeared to have been flung on its peg, and the closet revealed the mild disorder of a woman who has many other closets to organize.

Mrs. Leeds's diary was in a plum velvet box on the dressing table. The key was taped to the lid along with a check tag from the police property room.

Graham sat on a spindly white chair and opened the diary at random. The pages were flecked with detective's cigar ash. He read. 

He read on as the light outside faded and until he heard the rising telephone in the bedroom. 

A click and the hum of an answering machine. "Hello, this is Valerie Leeds. I'm sorry I can't come to the phone right now, but if you'll leave your name and number after the tone, we'll get back to you. Thank you." 

Graham half-expected to hear Crawford's voice after the beep, but there was only the dial tone. The caller had hung up.

He had heard her voice; now he wanted to see her. He went down to the den.

He had in his pocket a reel of movie film belonging to Charles Leeds.

At the police station, the detectives had offered Graham their projector. He wanted to watch the movie at the house. Reluctantly they let him check it out of the property room.

Graham found the screen and projector in the den closet, set them up, and sat down in Charles Leeds's big leather armchair to watch.

It was a pleasant little silent home movie, more imaginative than most. The film ended with a shot of the television screen and a pan to Charles Leeds snoring in the chair where Graham now sat.

Graham stared at the blank square of light on the screen. He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they are.  
~~~~~~  
Graham's head felt stuffed and achy. He drank alone in his hotel room until he was air-headed. Then the telephone rang, "Hey, baby! Where are you?"

"In this damned hotel in Atlanta."

"Doing some good?"

"None you'd notice. I'm lonesome."

"Me too."

"Tell me about yourself."

"Oh, I'm...I'm just worried for you."

"I see. I'm fine."

Silence, Molly knows I'm drunk, she's mad.

"Josh's fine. He's covering some turtle eggs the dogs dug up. Tell me what you're doing."

"Reading reports."

"Thinking a good bit, I expect."

"Yep."

"Can I help you?"

"Look, I just don't have a lock on anything, Molly. There's not enough information. Well, there's a lot of information, but I haven't done enough with it."

"...Will you be in Atlanta for a while? I'm not bugging you about coming home, I'm just wondering."

"I don't know. I'll be here a few more days at least," Graham sighed. "I miss you."

"All right." A fainter sigh from Molly. "Good night."

"Good ni-"

Molly hung up before Graham could finish. He sat with his head bowed, hands covering his eyes and tried to still his mind.

But it was his curse to pick at conversations, and he began to do it now.

He had snapped at her after a harmless question. 

But Graham had to keep this part of his life in a general fog for Molly and Willy. He found Molly's interest in these matters alarming.

Graham called police headquarters and left word for Springfield that he wanted to start helping with the legwork in the morning. There was nothing else to do.

The gin helped him sleep.  
~~~~~~  
Darkness, dim greens and blues; fading away to reveal a silent corridor. One Graham recognized instantly. He was in Bloomington, yes. Bloomington Minnesota. And he was about to kill Garret Jacob Hobbs.

Graham bolted to the exit- only to realize- that he could not move. He could not run nor scream. He could not wake up.

There were no armed guards beside him, no sirens or flashing lights. Even his own heavy breathing was diluted, as if submerged underwater. He was completely alone.

Graham walked closer to the door. His hands positioned in front of him at an armed stance. He held a 0.38, its wooden handle slippery from perspiration. 

Graham marvelled at the sincerity of his actions and steady hands. This was certainly not his body, it was a robotic capsule. A cage that he was trapped in, some parasite forced to witness everything his host did.

Graham begged himself to fumble, to drop it and never pick it up. He did not.

Darkness ate up everything behind Graham. Every single step he took was followed by racing shadows. The carpet, the walls, it was as if the hall itself was eliminating his only means of escape. Nothing else could exist except for this nightmare.

Inches away from the door; when suddenly, every particle in this imaginary plain seemed to warp toward one area. The air around the door turned into heavy waves that swirled, creating a hellish suction. It pulled and tugged at Graham. It felt like a breeze in reverse, a breeze that caressed and stroked. It blew nothing but horror onto Graham. For in his vegetative state he could not resist.

So, He could only watch himself slowly oblige.  
Drop his support hand from the magnum.  
Fumble at the knob.  
Enter.

Hell.  
The door swung open and Graham could not smell but he smelt it. The scent of carnage.  
Fear metastasized within Graham like cancerous cells. 

A living-room refurnished in red, proof of a long struggle.

Mrs. Louise Hobbs was sprawled over what once was a glass coffee table. A red puddle pooled around her. She was not dead. And noticing Graham, she crawled, slick red fingers moving slowly through broken glass. She was stabbed so many times, her face was not hers anymore, it was a series of open gashes, her body a mass of chunky pinks and stringy yellows.

Graham begged himself to turn around, to shut the door and break through the darkness. somewhere, anywhere, out!  
He did not.

Instead, he moved on, ignoring the choked pleas of a dying woman. Deeper into the apartment.

Frenzied steps onto the next hallway. Then blood, litres of it. Leaking at an alarming speed. Where?

Graham wanted to call for help, he wanted an ambulance and paramedics.

Abigail Hobbs laid gurgling in front of Graham. The blade had gone through her windpipe but not yet the arteries. Her eyes were glazed over and all the severed tubes in her body spluttered like broken faucets.

She blinked rapidly and Graham knelt down beside her. Abigail looked into Graham's eyes, her face contorted painfully. 

Reflected in her irises was a man.

It was-

Graham cried out in his empty hotel room.

Back again. This feeling was so familiar, nothing but his own heavy breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was Garret Hobbs. Will dreamt that he was Garret Hobbs.


	7. Chapter 7

Flimsy copies of the notes on all calls about the Leeds case were placed on Buddy Springfield's desk. Tuesday morning at seven o'clock when Springfield arrived at his office, there were sixty-three of them. The top one was red-flagged.

It said Birmingham police had found a cat buried in a shoebox behind the Jacobis' garage. The cat had a flower between its paws and was wrapped in a dish towel. The cat's name was written on the lid in a childish hand. It wore no collar. A string tied in a granny knot held the lid on.

The Birmingham medical examiner said the cat was strangled. He had shaved it and found no puncture wound.

Springfield tapped the earpiece of his glasses against his teeth.

They had found a soft ground and dug it up with a shovel. Didn't need any damned methane probe. Still, Graham had been right.

The chief of detectives licked his thumb and started through the rest of the stack of flimsies. Most were reports of suspicious vehicles in the neighbourhood during the past week, vague descriptions giving only vehicle type or colour. Four anonymous telephone callers had told Atlanta residents: "I'm gonna do you like the Leeds."

Jeremy Hoyt, the meter reader's report was in the middle of the pile.

Springfield called the overnight watch commander."What about the meter reader's report on this Parsons? Number forty-eight."

"We tried to check with the utilities last night, Chief, to see if they had anybody in that alley," the watch commander said.

"They'll have to get back to us this morning."

"You have somebody get back to them now," Springfield said. "Check sanitation, the city engineer, check for construction permits along the alley and catch me in my car."

He dialled Will Graham's number. "Will? Meet me in front of your hotel in ten minutes and let's take a little ride."  
~~~~~~  
At 7:45 A.M. Springfield parked near the end of the alley. He and Graham walked abreast in wheel tracks pressed in the gravel. 

Graham wore his thin frown and a cream shirt tucked loosely in black slacks.

The chain-link fence at the rear of the Leeds property was covered with vines. They paused by the light meter on the pole.  
"If he came down this way, he could see the whole back end of the house," Springfield said.

In only five days the Leeds property had begun to look neglected. The lawn was uneven, and wild onions sprouted above the grass. Small branches had fallen in the yard. The house seemed asleep, the latticed porch striped and dappled with the long morning shadows of the trees.

Standing with Springfield in the alley, Graham could see himself looking in the back window, opening the porch door. Oddly, his reconstruction of the entry by the killer seemed to elude him now, in the sunlight. He watched a child's swing move gently in the breeze.

"That looks like Parsons," Springfield said.

H. G. Parsons was out early, grubbing in a flowerbed in his back-yard, two houses down. Springfield and Graham went to Parsons' back gate and stood beside his garbage cans. The lids were chained to the fence.

Springfield sighed heavily and brushed back his hair before greeting the old geezer, Graham followed pursuit but Springfield pushed him back. 

Jack probably ran his mouth with Springfield, asshole. 

Graham lingered back dutifully and rehearsed his answers for Springfield's compulsory questioning later 

For awhile Springfield worked his magic and coaxed Parsons' to tell him that he had: "Seen em' from inside my kitchen. there from here. I never talked to him, I don't remember what he looked like."

Graham wished he had stayed at the hotel. Not here, listening to the blurred mumblings of an Alzheimer's patient.

"There. Are you satisfied? If that's all, I have a lot to do officer." Parsons asked.

Then, aback, Grahm realized. And then, he spoke for the first time. "You said you went to get your robe, and when you came back he was gone. You weren't dressed, then?"

"No."

"In the middle of the afternoon? Were you not feeling well, Mr. Parsons?"

"What I do in my own house is my business. I can wear a kangaroo suit in here if I want to. Why aren't you out looking for the killer?"

"I understand you're retired, Mr. Parsons, so I guess it doesn't matter if you put on your clothes every day or not. A lot of days you just don't get dressed at all, am I right?"

Veins stood out in Parsons' temples. "Just because I'm retired doesn't mean I don't put my clothes on and get busy every day. I just got hot and I came in and took a shower. I was working. I was mulching, and I had done a day's work by afternoon, which is more than you'll do today."

"You were what?"

"Mulching."

"What day did you do that?"

"Friday. It was last Friday. They delivered it in the morning, a big load, and I had...I had it all spread by afternoon. You can ask at the Garden Center how much it was."

"And you got hot and came in and took a shower. What were you doing in the kitchen?"

"Fixing a glass of iced tea."

"And you got out some ice? But the refrigerator is over there, away from the window."

Parsons looked at Graham, lost and confused. His eyes were dull, like the eyes of a fish in the market toward the end of the day. Then they brightened in triumph.

"I was at the cabinet, getting some Sweet 'N Low when I saw him. That's it. That's all. Now, if you're through prying..."

"I think he saw Hoyt," Graham said.

"So do I," Springfield said.

"It was not Jeremy Hoyt. It was not." Parsons' was a boiled lobster.

"How do you know?" Springfield said. "It might have been Jeremy Hoyt, and you just thought-"

"Hoyt is brown from the sun. He's got old greasy hair and those peckerwood sideburns." Parsons' voice had risen and he was talking so fast it was hard to understand him. "That's how I knew. Of course, it wasn't Hoyt. This fellow was paler and his hair was blond. He turned to write on his clipboard and I could see under the back of his hat. Blond. Cut off a square on the back of his neck."

Springfield stood absolutely still and when he spoke his voice was still skeptical. "What about his face?"

"I don't know. He may have had a mustache."

"Like Hoyt?"

"Hoyt doesn't have a mustache."

"Oh," Springfield said. "Was he at eye level with the meter? Did he have to look up at it?"

"Eye level, I guess."

"Would you know him if you saw him again?"

"No."

"What age was he?"

"Not old. I don't know."

"Did you see the Leedses' dog anywhere around him?"

"No."

"Look, Mr. Parsons, I can see I was wrong," Springfield said. "You're a real big help to us. If you don't mind, I'm going to send our artist out here, and if you'd just let him sit right here at your kitchen table, maybe you could give him an idea of what this fellow looked like. It sure wasn't Hoyt."

"I don't want my name in any newspapers.

"It won't be." Graham stated coldly before walking towards the car.

Springfield and Parsons looked after him. Are they glaring or just squinted from the sun?  
~~~~~~  
Springfield checked in on his car radio. None of the utilities or city agencies could account for the man in the alley on the day before the murders. Springfield reported Parsons' description and gave instructions for the artist. "Tell him to draw the pole and the meter first and go from there. He'll have to ease the witness along."

"Our artist doesn't much like to make house calls," the chief of detectives told Graham as he slid the stripline Ford through the traffic. "He likes for the secretaries to see him work, with the witness standing on one foot and then the other, looking over his shoulder. A police station is a damn poor place to question anybody that you don't need to scare. Soon as we get the picture, we'll door-to-door the neighbourhood with it."

"I feel like we just got a whiff, Will. Just faint, but a whiff, don't you? Look, you did it to the poor old devil and he came through. Now let's do something with it."

"If the man in the alley is the one we want, it's the best news yet," Graham said. He was sick of himself.

"Right. It means he's not just getting off a bus and going whichever way his peter points. He's got a plan. He stayed in town overnight. He knows where he's going a day or two ahead. He's got some kind of an idea. Case the place, kill the pet, then the family. What the hell kind of an idea is that?" Springfield paused, he had to tread carefully. "That's kind of your territory, isn't it?"

"It is, yes. If it's anybody's, I suppose it's mine."

"I know you've seen this kind of thing before. You didn't like it the other day when I asked you about Lecter, but I need to talk to you about it."

"...All right."

"He killed nine people, didn't he, in all?"

"Nine that we know of. Two others didn't die."

"What happened to them?"

"One is on a respirator at a hospital in Baltimore. The other is in a private mental hospital in Denver."

Looking back, Graham might have laughed; it was all too predictable. Springfield pounced on him like a rabid hyena, but he could only do so for Graham allowed him to.

Without Crawford shielding his pet, Springfield fired away. "What made him do it, how was he crazy?"

Graham lowered his head and looked at his lap. His voice sounded detached, as though he were dictating a letter.

"He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some heinous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to."

"What did the psychologists call it- what was wrong with him?"

"They say he's a sociopath because they don't know what else to call him. He has some of the characteristics of what they call a sociopath. He has no remorse or guilt at all. And he had the first and worst sign- sadism to animals as a child."

Springfield grunted.

"But he doesn't have any of the other marks," Graham said. "He wasn't a drifter, he had no history of trouble with the law. He wasn't shallow and exploitive in small things like most sociopaths are. He's not insensitive. They don't know what to call him. His electroencephalograms show some odd patterns, but they haven't been able to tell much from them."

"What would you call him?" Springfield asked.

Graham hesitated.

"Just to yourself, what do you call him?"

"He's a monster."

Graham is less steady, a wan, wet quality had contaminated his tone. "I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell."

A silence fills the car until Springfield's curiosity topples again.

"A couple of friends of mine in the chiefs' association are from Baltimore. I asked them how you spotted Lecter. They said they didn't know. How did you do it? What was the first indication, the first thing you felt?"

Graham pauses and when he starts again he returns with original aloofness.

"It was a coincidence," Graham said. "The sixth victim was killed in his workshop. He had woodworking equipment and he kept his hunting stuff out there. He was laced to a pegboard where the tools hung, and he was really torn up, cut and stabbed, and he had arrows in him. The wounds reminded me of something. I couldn't think what it was."

"And you had to go on to the next ones."

"Yes. Lecter was very hot- he did the next three in nine days. I think he enjoyed my desperation. But this sixth one, he had two old scars on his thigh. The pathologist checked with the local hospital and found he had fallen out of a tree blind five years before while he was bow hunting and stuck an arrow through his leg. The doctor of record was a resident surgeon, but Lecter had treated him first- he was on duty in the emergency room. His name was on the admission log. It had been a long time since the accident, but I thought Lecter might remember if anything had seemed peculiar about the arrow wound, so I went to his office to see him. We were grabbing at anything then."

Springfield resigned from the wheel as they were trapped in traffic. He rummaged in a compartment before taking out a lighter for his smoke.

"He was practicing psychiatry by that time. He had a nice office. Antiques. He said he didn't remember much about the arrow wound, that one of the victim's hunting buddies had brought him in, and that was it. Something bothered me, though. It was something Lecter said or something in the office."

Graham declined Springfield's offer and instead rolled down a window, the car instantly filled with the humid purr of resting vehicles on a silent highway.

"Crawford hashed it over. We checked the files, and Lecter had no record. I wanted some time in his office by myself, but we couldn't get a warrant. We had nothing to show. So I went back to see him."

Graham shifted and folded his hands on his abdomen. Distant sirens sounded. A firetruck, ambulance, or a chase. An urgent repetition of blaring noise.

"It was Sunday, he saw patients on Sunday. The building was empty except for a couple of people in his waiting room."

The source of the noise neared. A Car honked for them to shift away and Springfield was forced to tear his eyes away from Graham.

"He saw me right away. We were talking and he was trying to make this polite effort to help me and I looked up, there were old medical books on the shelf above. And I knew."

Graham paused for a long time before taking a cigarette, he leaned in and Springfield lit it for him.

"I knew it was him. When I looked at him again, maybe my face changed, I don't know. I knew it and he knew I knew it."

The ambulance passed them, a blur of flashing reds and blues.

"I still couldn't think of a reason. I didn't trust it. I had to know why. So, I...I mumbled something and got out of there, into the hall. There was a pay phone in the hall. I needed help. I was talking to the police switchboard when he came out a service door behind me."

Grahm inhaled then puffed hard and slow, smoke was beginning to cover ground in the car.

"I never heard him coming. But I felt him. He took my waist, and then...and then there was the rest of it."

"Okay," Springfield swallowed dryly. "Okay. Thank you for telling me."

"But...How did you know?"

"I think it was maybe a week later in the hospital I finally figured it out. It was Wound Man- an illustration they used in a lot of the early medical books like the ones Lecter had. It shows different kinds of battle injuries, all in one figure. I had seen it in a survey course a pathologist was teaching at GWU. The sixth victim's position and his injuries were a close match to Wound Man."

"Wound Man, you say? That's all you had?"

"Well, yeah. It was a coincidence that I had seen it. A piece of luck."

"That's some luck."

Springfield fucked around with his lighter as Graham lapsed into another silence.

"You want to know why he let me go don't you?" Surprisingly, Graham looked at Springfield in the face this time, his question more of a statement; like some planned cross-examination.

Springfield felt slightly offended, so he fought back: "He's crazy about you ain't he?"

Springfield's square stare met cold blue ones. Then Graham laughed.

After he finished laughing Graham said: "Hannibal Lecter doesn't love anyone because no one can ever love him."

Then he turned away and didn't speak for the rest of the ride.  
~~~~~~  
Parsons' description of the man in the alley and the information on the cat and the dog were possible indications of the killer's methods; it seemed likely that he scouted as a meter reader and felt compelled to hurt the victims' pets before he came to kill the family.

The immediate problem the police faced was whether or not to publicize their theory.

With the public aware of the danger signals and watching, police might get advance warning of the killer's next attack - but the killer probably followed the news too.

He might change his habits.

There was a strong feeling in the police department that the slender leads should be kept secret except for a special bulletin to veterinarians and animal shelters throughout the Southeast asking for immediate reports on pet mutilations.

That meant not giving the public the best possible warning. It was a moral question, and the police were not comfortable with it.

They consulted Dr. Alan Bloom in Chicago. Dr. Bloom said that if the killer read a warning in the newspapers, he would probably change his method of casing a house. Dr. Bloom doubted that the man could stop attacking the pets, regardless of the risk. The psychiatrist told the police that they should by no means assume they had twenty-five days to work - the period before the next full moon on August 25th.

On the morning of July 31st, three hours after Parsons gave his description, a decision was reached in a telephone conference among Birmingham and Atlanta police and Crawford in Washington: they would send the private bulletin to veterinarians, canvass for three days in the neighbourhood with the artist's sketch, then release the information to the news media.

For those three days, Graham and the Atlanta detectives pounded the sidewalks showing the sketch to householders in the area of the Leeds home. There was only a suggestion of a face in the sketch, but they hoped to find someone who could improve it.

Graham's copy of the sketch grew soft around the edges from constant fingering. Often it was difficult to get residents to answer the door. At night he lay in his room, his mind circling the problem as though it were a hologram. He courted the feeling that precedes an idea. It would not come.

Meanwhile, there were four accidental injuries and one fatality in Atlanta as householders shot at relatives coming home late. Prowler calls multiplied and useless tips stacked up in the In baskets at police headquarters. Despair went around like the flu.

Crawford returned from Washington at the end of the third day and dropped in on Graham as he sat with his sleeves rolled up.

"Hot work?"

"...Grab a sketch in the morning and see," Graham said.

"No, it'll all be on the news tonight. Did you walk all day?"

"I can't drive through their yards."

"I didn't think anything would come of this canvass," Crawford said.

"Well, what the hell did you expect me to do?"

"The best you can, that's all. of course I don't want to push you out of your comfort zone." Crawford rose to leave. "Busywork's been a narcotic for me sometimes, especially after I quit the booze. For you too, I think. "

Crawford threw him a look.

Graham was angry. Crawford was right, of course.

Graham was a natural procrastinator, and he knew it.

There was something else he could do, and it had eaten away at him for days. He could wait until he was driven to it by desperation in the last days before the full moon. Or he could do it now, so he can keep his dignity while it might be of some use.

There was an opinion he wanted. A very strange view he had to share, a mindset he had to recover after his comfort in the Keys; he needed fear to gain answers.

The reasons elacked like roller-coaster cogs pulling up to the first long plunge, Springfield had pushed him; and at the top, unaware of his hands resting upon his abdomen, Graham said it aloud.

"I have to see Lecter."


	8. Chapter 8

Dr. Frederick Chilton, chief of staff at the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, came around his desk to shake Will Graham's hand.

"Dr. Bloom called me yesterday, Mr. Graham- or should I call you Dr. Graham?"

"I'm not a doctor."

Chilton studied Graham out of the corner of his eye. The special investigator had bedhead for days and wore a dark navy suit that was too big on him.

"I was delighted to hear from Dr. Bloom, we've known each other for years. Take that chair."

"We appreciate your help, Dr. Chilton."

"Umm-hmm...Frankly, I sometimes feel like Lecter's secretary rather than his keeper," Chilton said. "The volume of his mail alone is a nuisance. I think among some researchers it's considered chic to correspond with him- I've seen his letters framed in psychology departments- and for a while, it seemed that every Ph.D. candidate in the field wanted to interview him. He ignored everyone, except you of course. Glad to cooperate with you, and Dr. Bloom."

Graham's lips were pursed into a slight, bent line, and he averted eye contact with Chilton.

"I need to see Dr. Lecter in as much privacy as possible," Graham said. "I may need to see him again or telephone him after today."

Chilton nodded. "To begin with, Dr. Lecter will stay in his room. That is absolutely the only place where he is not put in restraints. One wall of his room is a double barrier which opens on the hall. I'll have a chair put there, and screens if you like. I must ask you not to pass him any objects whatever, other than paper free of clips or staples. No ring binders, pencils, or pens. He has his own felt-tipped pens."

"I might have to show him some material that could stimulate him," Graham said.

"You can show him what you like as long as it's on soft paper. Pass him documents through the sliding food tray. Don't hand anything through the barrier and do not accept anything he might extend through the barrier. He can return papers in the food tray. I insist on that. Dr. Bloom and Mr. Crawford assured me that you would cooperate on the procedure."

"I will," Graham said. He started to rise.

"I know you're anxious to get on with it, Mr. Graham, but I want to tell you something first. This will interest you. It may seem gratuitous to warn you, of all people, about Lecter. But he's very disarming. For a year after he was brought here, he behaved perfectly and gave the appearance of cooperating with attempts at therapy. As a result- this was under the previous administrator- security around him was slightly relaxed."

Chilton coughed and gestured for Grahm to sit down once more. He did not. 

"On the afternoon of July 8th, 1976, he complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes."

Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. 

"Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue."

Chilton could read nothing in Graham's face.

"You know, when Lecter was first captured we thought he might provide us with a singular opportunity to study a pure sociopath," Chilton continued. "It's so rare to get one alive. Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry...and he's a mass murderer. He seemed cooperative, and we thought that he could be a window on this kind of aberration. We thought we'd be like Beaumont studying digestion through the opening in St. Martin's stomach. As it turned out, I don't think we're any closer to understanding him now than the day he came in. Have you ever talked with Lecter for any length of time?"

"No. I just saw him when...I saw him mainly in court. Dr. Bloom showed me his articles in the journals," Graham said.

"Is that so? He seems to be very familiar with you. He's given you a lot of thought. After all, you're the last of his surviving victims."

"You had some sessions with him?"

"Yes. Twelve. He's impenetrable. Too sophisticated about the tests for them to register anything. Edwards, Fabré, even Dr. Bloom himself had a crack at him. I have their notes. He was an enigma to them too. It's impossible, of course, to tell what he's holding back or whether he understands more than he'll say. Oh, since his commitment he's done some brilliant pieces for The American Journal of Psychiatry and The General Archives. But they're always about problems he doesn't have. I think he's afraid that if we 'solve' him, nobody will be interested in him anymore and he'll be stuck in a backward somewhere for the rest of his life."

Chilton paused. He had practiced using his peripheral vision to watch his subject in interviews. He believed that he could watch Graham this way undetected. 

"The consensus around here is that the only person who has demonstrated any practical understanding of Hannibal Lecter is you, Mr. Graham. Can you tell me anything about him?"

Chilton watched Graham bow his head and stiffen, it seemed that he didn't want to betray his facade.

"No."

"Some of the staff are curious about this: when you saw Dr. Lecter's murders, their 'style,' so to speak, were you able perhaps to reconstruct his fantasies? And did that help you identify him?"

Graham did not answer.

"We're woefully short of material on that sort of thing. There's one single piece in The Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Would you mind talking with some of the staff- no, no, not this trip- Dr. Bloom was very severe with me on that point. I was to leave you alone. Next trip, perhaps."

Dr. Chilton has seen a lot of hostility. He was seeing leaked bits at the moment. Graham stood up. "Thank you, doctor. I want to see Hannibal Lecter now."  
~~~~~~  
The steel door of the maximum-security section closed behind Graham. He heard the bolt slide home.

Graham knew that Lecter slept most of the morning. He looked down the corridor. At this angle, he could not see into Lecter's cell, but he could tell that the lights inside were dimmed.

Graham needed time to brace himself. If he felt Lecter's madness in his head, he had to contain it quickly.

Inhale, exhale.

To cover the sound of his footsteps, he followed an orderly pushing a linen cart. Dr. Lecter is very difficult to slip up on.

Graham paused partway down the hall. 

Steel bars covered the entire front of the cell. Behind the bars, farther than arm's reach, was a stout nylon net stretched ceiling to floor and wall to wall. Through the barrier, Graham could see a table and chair bolted to the floor. The table was stacked with softcover books and correspondence. 

He walked up to the bars, put his hands on them, then ripped away as if burned. Graham's eyes were sore and he felt a knot form in his throat.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter lay on his cot, his head propped on a pillow against the wall. Alexandre Dumas' Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine was open on his chest.

Graham willed himself to stare through the bars for about five seconds before Lecter opened his eyes and said: "That's the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court."

Inhale, exhale.

"...I keep getting it for Christmas."

Dr. Lecter's eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points. Graham felt his gaze on his neck. He brushed his hand on his nape and then moved it to secure his abdomen.

"Christmas, yes," Lecter said. "Did you get my card?"

"I got it. Thank you."

Dr. Lecter had a tradition of writing letters. However, aside from the "best wishes" and holiday greetings; he wrote to his victims. 

Now, most of the letters were detected beforehand and intercepted before certain trauma, but his latest Christmas card had been forwarded to Graham from the FBI crime laboratory in Washington. 

Graham read it alone, like always; then he burned it and drank. Graham had always viewed these open taunts as immature and vain. 

Lecter rose and walked over to his table. He is graceful, a lithely built man. 

"Why don't you have a seat, Will? I think there are some folding chairs in a closet just down that way. At least, that's where it sounds like they come from."

"The orderly's bringing one."

Lecter stood until Graham was seated in the hall. "And how is your wound?" he asked.

"I'm fine." 

"That coat is Crawford's, isn't it? Did he send you, Will?"

"No. Nobody did."

"Yes, It would be most unfortunate for one's emotional problems to intercept their work. Especially those blessed; do you ever have any problems, Will?"

"No."

"Of course you don't."

Graham felt that Lecter was looking through to the back of his skull. His attention was unbearable. Cold parasites dug around his brain.

"I'm glad you came. It's been what now, three years? My callers are all professional. Banal clinical psychiatrists and grasping second-rate doctors of psychology from silo colleges somewhere. Pencil lickers trying to protect their tenure with pieces in the journals."

"Dr. Bloom showed me your article on surgical addiction in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry."

"And?"

"Very interesting, even to a layman."

"A layman...layman- layman. Interesting term," Lecter said. "So many learned fellows going about. So many experts on government grants. And you say you're a layman. But it was you who caught me, wasn't it, Will? Do you know how you did it?"

"I'm sure you've read the transcript. It's all in there." 

"No, it's not. Do you know how you did it, Will?"

"...It's in the transcript. What does it matter now?"

"It doesn't matter to me, Will."

The doctor smiled coyly.

"I want you to help me, Dr. Lecter." 

"Yes, I thought so."

"It's about Atlanta and Birmingham." 

"Yes, I know."

"You read about it, I'm sure."

"I've read the papers. I can't clip them. They won't let me have scissors, of course. Sometimes they threaten me with the loss of books, you know. I wouldn't want them to think I was dwelling on anything morbid." He laughed. Dr. Lecter has sharp white teeth. "You want to know how he's choosing them, don't you?"

"I thought you would have some ideas. I'm asking you to tell me what they are."

"Why should I?"

Graham had anticipated the question. A reason to stop multiple murders would not occur readily to Dr. Lecter.

"There are things you don't have," Graham began his script. "Research materials, filmstrips even. I'd speak to the chief of staff."

"Ah yes, Chilton. You must have seen him when you came in. Gruesome, isn't it? Tell me the truth, he fumbled at your head like a freshman pulling at a panty girdle, didn't he? Watched you out of the corner of his eye. Picked that up, didn't you? You may not believe this, but he actually tried to give me a Thematic Apperception Test. He was sitting there just like the Cheshire cat waiting for Mf 13 to come up. Ha. Forgive me, I forget that you're not among the anointed. It's a card with a woman in bed and a man in the foreground. I was supposed to avoid a sexual interpretation. I laughed. He puffed up and told everybody I avoided prison with a Ganser syndrome- never mind, it's boring."

"You'd have access to the AMA filmstrip library."

"I think you know the things I want."

"...What?"

"I have quite enough to read as it is."

"You'd get to see the file on this case. There's another reason." 

"Pray."

"I thought you might be curious to find out if you're smarter than the person I'm looking for."

"Then, by implication, you think you are smarter than I am since you caught me." 

"No. I know I'm not smarter than you are."

"Then how did you catch me, Will?"

"You had disadvantages."

"What disadvantages?" 

"You're insane."

"Ah, I suppose so. But I also have something else, Will. Do You know what that is?" Dr. Lecter seldom holds his head upright. He tilts it as he asks a question, as though he were screwing an auger of curiosity into your face. 

"Passion."

"Correct. Oh, you're so bright."

"Will you help me, doctor?"

"You're very pale, Will." 

Graham did not answer.

"Your hands are red and soft. They don't look like an investigator's hands anymore. That soap is something a child would select. It has a little ship on the bottle, doesn't it?" Another silence before: "Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity."

"I don't think I'll persuade you. You'll do it or you won't. Dr. Bloom is working on it anyway, and he's the most-"

"Do you have the file with you?" 

"Yes."

"And pictures?"

"Yes."

"Let me have them, and I might consider it." 

"No."

"Do you dream much, Will?"

Graham rose from his seat, moving swiftly towards the exit. Hannibal Lecter did not often lose his composure. Few exceptions exist. Torturing William Graham was one of them. 

"Do you think it's because I like to look at you and imagine how good you would taste...?" Lecter watched Graham freeze, his rigid backside shaking ever so slightly. Then he begins again, maliciously. "Tell me, Will, Why did Crawford send you? Even after I struck you- and what a wonderful sound you made! You were good Will; I should've taken your heart when you fought me. Oh, Your comic attempts as I parted your tender flesh, yes; I do crave-"

"Good-bye, Dr. Lecter."

"You haven't threatened to take away my books yet."

Graham walked away briskly.

"Let me have the file, then. I'll tell you what I think."

Graham had to pack the abridged file tightly into the sliding tray. Lecter pulled it through.

"There's a summary on top. You can read that now," Graham said.

"Do you mind if I do it privately? Give me an hour."  
~~~~~~  
Graham waited on a tired plastic couch in a grim lounge. Orderlies came in for coffee. He did not speak to them. He stared at small objects in the room and felt glad that they held still in his vision. He took Bufferin to numb.

The turnkey admitted him to the maximum-security section after exactly an hour.

Lecter sat at his table, his eyes filmed. Graham knew he had spent most of the time with the pictures.

"This is a very shy boy, Will. I'd love to meet him...Have you considered the possibility that he's disfigured? Or that he may believe he's disfigured?"

"The mirrors."

"Yes. You notice he smashed all the mirrors in the houses, not just enough to get the pieces he wanted. He doesn't just put the shards in place for the damage they cause. They're set so he can see himself. In their eyes- Mrs. Jacobi and...What was the other name?"

"Mrs. Leeds."

"Yes."

"That's interesting," Graham said.

"It's not 'interesting.' You'd thought of that before."

"I had considered it."

Lecter bore into him once again.

"You just came here to look at me. Just to get the old scent again, didn't you? Why don't you just smell yourself?"

Graham did not shake this time, he was prepared.

"I want your opinion."

"I don't have one right now."

"When you do have one, I'd like to bear it." 

"May I keep the file?"

"I haven't decided yet," Graham said.

"How about the pictures?"

"No. That would be obscene."

"Why are there no descriptions of the grounds? Here we have frontal views of the houses, floor plans, diagrams of the rooms where the deaths occurred, and little mention of the grounds. What were the yards like?"

"Big backyards, fenced, with some hedges. Why?"

"Because, my dear Will, if this pilgrim feels a special relationship with the moon, he might like to go outside and look at it. Before he tidies himself up, you understand. Have you seen blood in the moonlight, Will? Of course, you have. It appears quite black. But it still keeps its distinctive sheen. If one were nude, say, it would be better to have outdoor privacy for that sort of thing. One must show some consideration for the neighbours, hmm?"

"You think the yard might be a factor when he selects victims?"

"Oh yes. And there will be more victims, of course. Let me keep the file, Will. I'll study it. When you get more files, I'd like to see them, too. You can call me. On the rare occasions when my lawyer calls, they bring me a telephone. They used to patch him through on the intercom, but everyone listened of course. Would you like to give me your home number?"

"No."

"Do you know how you caught me, Will."

"Good-bye, Dr. Lecter. You can leave messages for me at the number on the file."

Graham walked away.

"Do you know how you caught me?"

Graham was out of Lecter's sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door.

"The reason you caught me is that we're just alike" was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness. Walking with his head down, speaking to no one, he could hear his blood. 

It seemed a very short distance to the outside. This was only a building; there were only five doors between Lecter and the outside. 

He had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him, he could feel his breath on his neck, his hands on his waist. He stopped outside the entrance and looked around him, assuring himself that he was alone.  
~~~~~~  
From a car across the street, his long lens propped on the window sill, Freddy Lounds got a nice profile shot of Graham in the doorway and the words in stone above him: "Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane."

As it turned out, The National Tattler cropped the picture to just Graham's face and the last two words in the stone. Caption being: "COP VISITS OLD PAL."


	9. Chapter 9

Dr. Hannibal Lecter lay on his cot with the cell lights down after Will left him. Several hours passed.

For a while he had textures; the weave of the pillowcase against his hands clasped behind his head, the smooth membrane that lined his cheek, coppery warmth in his mouth, and digging until rich violet emerges. 

The doctor had not missed it much until Will came. In truth, Lector adored the man. He was a very valuable companion. Queerly, he was more valuable than Freedom. 

Because, yes, insanity. But also something else. 

Then he had odours and let his mind play over them. Some were real, some were not. They had put Clorox in the drains; semen. They were serving chilli down the hall; sweat-stiffened khaki. Graham would not give him his home telephone number; the bitter dry smell of gin, and sweet vanilla. He smokes now, how boring. 

Lecter sat up. The man might have been civil. His thoughts had the warm brass smell of an electric clock. Will had come here on his own accord, how nice of him to do so.

Lecter blinked several times, and his eyebrows rose. He turned up the lights and wrote a note to Chilton asking for a telephone to call his counsel.

Lecter was entitled by law to speak with his lawyer in privacy and he hadn't abused the right. Since Chilton would never allow him to go to the telephone, the telephone was brought to him.

Two guards brought it, unrolling a long cord from the telephone jack at their desk. One of the guards had the keys. The other held a can of Mace.

"Go to the back of the cell, Dr. Lecter. Face the wall. If you turn around or approach the barrier before you hear the lock snap, I'll Mace you in the face. Understand?"

"Yes indeed," Lecter said. "Thank you so much for bringing the telephone."

He had to reach through the nylon net to dial. Chicago information gave him numbers for the University of Chicago Department of Psychiatry and Dr. Alan Bloom's office number. He dialled the psychiatry department switchboard.

"I'm trying to reach Dr. Alan Bloom."

"I'm not sure he's in today, but I'll connect you."

"Just a second, I'm supposed to know his secretary's name and I'm embarrassed to say I've forgotten it."

"Linda King. Just a moment."

"Thank you."

The telephone rang eight times before it was picked up. "Linda King's desk."

"Hi, Linda?"

"Linda doesn't come in on Saturday."

Dr. Lecter had counted on that. "Maybe you could help me if you don't mind. This is Bob Greer at Blame and Edwards Publishing Company. Dr. Bloom asked me to send a copy of the Overholser book, The Psychiatrist and the Law, to Will Graham, and Linda was supposed to send me the address and phone number, but she never did."

"I'm just a graduate assistant, she'll be in on Mon-"

"I have to catch Federal Express with it in about five minutes, and I hate to bother Dr. Bloom about it at home because he told Linda to send it and I don't want to get her in hot water. It's right there in her Rolodex or whatever. I'll dance at your wedding if you'll read it to me."

"She doesn't have a Rolodex."

"How about a Call Caddy with the slide on the side?"

"Yes."

"Be a darling and slide that rascal and I won't take up any more of your time."

"What was the name?"

"Graham. William Graham."

"All right, his home number is 305 JL5-7002."

"I'm supposed to mail it to his house."

"It doesn't give the address of his house."

"What does it have?"

"Federal Bureau of Investigation, Tenth and Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C. Oh, and Post Office Box 3680, Marathon, Florida."

"That's fine, you're an angel."

"You're welcome."

Lecter felt much better. He thought he might surprise Graham with a call sometime, or if the man couldn't be civil, he might have a hospital-supply house mail Graham a colostomy bag for old times' sake. 

In the darkness of his cell, Dr. Lector's eyes twinkled as he began to plan.


	10. Chapter 10

The plane from Washington to Birmingham was half-empty. Graham took a window seat with no one beside him.

He declined the sandwich the stewardess offered and put his Jacobi file on the tray table. At the front, he had listed the similarities between the Jacobis and the Leedses.

Both couples were in their late thirties, both had children- two boys and a girl. Edward Jacobi had another son, by a previous marriage, who was away at college when the family was killed.

Both parents in each case had college degrees, and both families lived in two-story houses in pleasant suburbs. Mrs. Jacobi and Mrs. Leeds were attractive women. The families had some of the same credit cards and they subscribed to some of the same popular magazines.

There the similarities ended. Charles Leeds was a tax attorney, while Edward Jacobi was an engineer and metallurgist. The Atlanta family were Presbyterian; the Jacobis were Catholic. The Leedses were lifelong Atlanta residents, while the Jacobis had lived in Birmingham for only three months, transferred there from Detroit.

The word "random" sounded in Graham's head like a dripping faucet. "Random selection of victims," "no apparent motive", newspapers used those terms, and detectives spat them out in anger and frustration in homicide squad rooms. "Random" wasn't accurate, though. Graham knew those mass murderers and serial murderers do not select their victims at random. He knew it from experience.

The man who killed the Jacobis and the Leedses saw something in them that drew him and drove him to do it, something that- if destroyed, provided him with great pleasure. He might have known them well, or he might not have known them at all. But Graham was sure the killer saw them at some time before he killed them. He chose them because something in them spoke to him, and the women were at the core of it. 

What was it?

In both places were the same blond hairs, same spit, same semen. Graham propped photographs of the two smiling families against the seat back in front of him and stared at them for a long time in the hanging quiet of the airplane.  
What could have attracted the murderer specifically to them? Graham wanted very much to believe there was a common factor and that he would find it soon.  
Otherwise, he would have to enter more houses and see what the Tooth Fairy had left for him.  
~~~~~~  
Graham got directions from the Birmingham field office and checked in with the police by walking to a station two kilometres away from the airport. Just before he left the range of the station, a hand jerked his shoulder back. Graham instinctively swerved to shove, successfully pulling a distance between them.

"Wait! Mr. Graham!" The man made a move to near Graham before deciding against it. He held out his hands, "Relax, I don't got a gun on me."

Graham calmed his racing heart. He kept the length between them and wearily asked: "Who are you?"

"You don't recognize me?" 

Graham shook his head no.

"I'm the fellow that kept questioning you during your speech," Graham squinted in the bright sunlight, it was him. 

"I'm Smith, Detective Smith. You used to teach me at the FBI Academy." the man waited until faint astonishment passed over Graham's face, then he stepped forward and extended his hand. Graham shook it.

"I know where you're going, can I offer you a ride?"  
~~~~~~  
Smith owned a sh*tty compact car that spat water from the air-conditioner vents onto his hands and arms. The inside of the car was littered with cigarette ash, documents and takeout napkins, the whole thing smelt like a high school change room. 

Graham's destination was the Geehan Realty office on Dennison Avenue, an hour away.

"At first, I wasn't sure if it was you, so I went home and dug up pictures of our year, and I was right!" Smith exclaimed. "I still can't believe it, Mr. Graham, I thought you had retired! Good to see you again."

"Me as well," Graham remarked laconically.

Smith faced Graham and handed him a lighter and a pack. Graham lit one for Smith and himself. They smoked facing a red light. 

"I know what you've been doing now, with the case and all." Smith unrolled a window and puffed out, "But why'd you stop teaching at the Academy? You were pretty good, all the girls liked you. And all the guys."

Graham leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes. Lector. 

"Smith, your classmates and you hated me. I gave out too much homework."

Smith laughed heartily and choked on his smoke. Graham stubbed his out and patted Smith until he recovered.

"For real though, you were really good Mr. Graham, I mean; you were pretty young when you taught us. And..."

Graham knew what was coming, Smith read the National Tattler religiously.

"And I totally get why you would leave, like, just the thought of a psycho like Lector getting obsessed with me is enough to send me home."

Graham was aware of the attention he received from Dr. Lector. But he was not obsessed with Graham. 

They had built quite the friendship together while investigating "the Chesapeake Ripper." Graham won't deny that he had enjoyed Lector's company- as a therapist and potential friend. 

Hannibal Lector was ultimately just a very sadistic monster. But no matter how condescending or passive-aggressive the doctor may act, Graham still held some power. Therefore he accepts the fact that his suffering brings Lector joy.

An exchange of heinous interests, it's parasitical commensalism.

Graham thanked Smith as he dropped him off. He watched him speed off before turning around.  
~~~~~~  
Geehan, the real-estate agent, made haste across his turquoise shag to greet Graham. His smile faded when Graham showed his identification and asked for the key to the Jacobi house.

"Will there be some cops in uniform out there today?" he asked his hand on the top of his head.

"I don't know."

"I hope to God not. I've got a chance to show it twice this afternoon."

"Have any single men asked to look at it?"

"They haven't asked me. It's a multiple listing. I don't think so, though."

"Do you know who Mr. Jacobi's executor is?"

"Umm...Byron, Byron Metcalf, the firm of Metcalf and Barnes. How long you figure on being out there?"

"I don't know. Until I've finished."

"You can drop that key in the mail. You don't have to come back by."  
~~~~~~  
Graham took two buses before he reached the Jacobis' district. He that flat feeling of a cold trail as he walked alone towards the Jacobi house. It was barely within the city limits in an area newly annexed. He stopped beside a mailbox to check his map before turning into a wooded lot. 

More than a month had passed since they were killed. What had he been doing then? Putting a pair of diesel in a sixty-five foot Rybovich hull, he would stay late to wash his gloves and Molly would get mad. Molly always seemed to be reminding him of something he needed to do. Molly was too good, I'm wasting her time...

The sound of the realtor's sign smacking against its post jolted Grahm out of his thoughts. The Jacobi house was the only one on the right side of the road. Sap from the pecan trees beside the drive had made the gravel sticky, and it rattled inside the fenders of the car. 

A carpenter on a ladder was installing window guards. The workman raised a hand to Graham as he walked around the house. 

A flagged patio at the side was shaded by a large oak tree. At night the tree would block out the floodlight in the side yard as well. This was where the Tooth Fairy had entered, through sliding glass doors. 

Graham went inside. Bare floors and dead air. His footsteps echoed in the empty house.

The new mirrors in the bathrooms had never reflected the Jacobis' faces or the killer's. On each was a fuzzy white spot where the price had been torn off. A folded dropcloth lay in a corner of the master bedroom. Graham sat on it long enough for the sunlight through the bare windows to move one board-width across the floor.

There was nothing here. Nothing anymore.

If he had come here immediately after the Jacobis were killed, would the Leedses still be alive? Graham wondered. He tested the weight of that burden.

It did not lift when he was out of the house and under the sky again.

Graham stood in the shade of a pecan tree, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets, and looked down the long drive to the road that passed in front of the Jacobi house.

How had the Tooth Fairy come to the Jacobi house? He had to drive. Where did he park? The gravel driveway was too noisy for a midnight visit, Graham thought.  
~~~~~~  
He walked down the drive to the roadside. A horse in the pasture beside the yard kept pace with Graham as he walked along the whitewashed fence toward the rear of the property. He gave the horse a Life- Saver and left him at the corner as he turned along the back fence behind the outbuildings.

He stopped when he saw the depression in the ground where the Jacobi children had buried their cat. 

Thinking about it in the Atlanta police station with Springfield, he had pictured the outbuildings as white. Actually, they were dark green.

The children had wrapped the cat in a dish towel and buried it in a shoebox with a flower between its paws.

Graham rested his forearm on top of the fence and leaned his forehead against it.

A pet funeral, a solemn rite of childhood. The children looking at one another, discovering new nerves in the place loss pierces. One bows her head, then they all do, the shovel taller than any of them. Afterward, a family discussion and the children don't shout for a while.

A certainty came to Graham as he stood, he looked at his shoe: as surely as the Tooth Fairy killed the cat, he had watched the children bury it. He had to see that if he possibly could. He did not make two trips out here, one to kill the cat and the second for the Jacobis. He came and killed the cat and waited for the children to find it.

There was no way to determine exactly where the children found the cat. The police had located no one who spoke to the Jacobis that afternoon, ten hours or so before they died.

How had the Tooth Fairy come, and where had he waited?

Behind the back fence, the brush began, running taller than Graham for thirty yards to the trees. Graham dug his wrinkled map out of his back pocket and spread it on the fence. It showed an unbroken strip of woods a quarter-mile deep running across the back of the Jacobi property and continuing in both directions. Beyond the woods, bounding them on the south, was a section line road that paralleled the one in front of the Jacobi house.

Graham trekked from the house back to the highway, measuring the distance on his odometer. He advanced south on the highway and turned onto the section line road he had seen on the map. Measuring again, he walked slowly along it until the odometer showed him he was behind the Jacobi house on the other side of the woods.

Graham took a deep breath and headed for the dark woods across the road.

The underbrush, heavy at the edge of the pine woods, thinned when Graham reached the deep shade and he had it easy going over the pine needles. The air was warm and still. Blue jays in the trees ahead announced his coming.

The ground sloped gently to a dry streambed where a few cypresses grew and the tracks of raccoons and field mice were pressed into the red clay. A number of human footprints marked the streambed, some of them left by children. All were caved in and rounded, left several showers of rain ago.

Past the streambed the land rose again, changing to sandy loam that supported ferns beneath the pines. Graham worked his way uphill until he saw the light beneath the trees at the edge of the woods.

Between the trunks, he could see the upper story of the Jacobi house.

Undergrowth again, head-high from the edge of the woods to the Jacobis' back fence. Graham worked his way through it and stood at the fence looking into the yard.

The Tooth Fairy could have parked at the housing development and come through the woods to the brush behind the house. He could have lured the cat into the brush and choked it, the body limp in one hand as he crawled on his knees and another hand to the fence. 

Graham could see the cat in the air, never twisting to land on its feet, but hitting on its back with a thump in the yard.

The Tooth Fairy did that in daylight- the children would not have found or buried the cat at night.

And he waited to see them find it. Did he wait for the rest of the day in the heat of the underbrush? At the fence, he would be visible through the rails. In order to see the yard from farther back in the brush, he would have to stand and face the windows of the house with the sun beating on him. Clearly, he would go back to the trees. So did Graham.

The Birmingham police were not stupid. He could see where they had pushed through the brush, searching the area as a matter of course. But that was before the cat was found. They were looking for clues, dropped objects, tracks- not for a vantage point. Graham wondered briefly if Smith was part of the search team. He never bothered to ask. 

He went a few yards into the forest behind the Jacobi house and worked back and forth in the dappled shade. First, he took the high ground that afforded a partial view of the yard and then worked his way down the tree line.

He had searched for more than an hour when a wink of light from the ground caught his eye. He lost it, found it again. It was the ring-pull tab from a soft-drink can half-buried in the leaves beneath an elm tree, one of the few elms among the pines.

He spotted it from eight feet away and went no closer for five minutes while he scanned the ground around the tree. He knelt and brushed the leaves away ahead of him as he approached the tree, striding in the path he made to avoid ruining any impressions.

Working slowly, he cleared the leaves all around the trunk. No footprints had pressed through the mat of last year's leaves.

Near the aluminum tab, he found a dried apple core eaten thinly by ants. Birds had pecked out the seeds. He studied the ground for ten more minutes. Finally, he sat on the ground, stretched out his aching legs, and leaned back against the tree.

A cone of gnats swarmed in a column of sunlight. A caterpillar rippled along the underside of a leaf.

There was a wedge of red creek mud from the instep of a boot on the limb above his head.

Graham hung his coat on a branch and began to climb carefully on the opposite side of the tree, peering around the trunk at the limbs above the wedge of mud. At thirty feet he looked around the trunk, and there was the Jacobi house 175 yards away. It looked different from this height, the roof colour dominant. He could see the backyard and the ground behind the outbuildings very well. A decent pair of field glasses would pick up the expression on a face easily at this distance.

Graham could hear traffic in the distance, and far away he heard cicadas starting their numbing bandsaw buzz. Still, be still. He drowned out the other sounds.

A thick limb just above him joined the trunk at a right angle to the Jacobi house. He pulled himself up until he could see, and leaned around the trunk to look at it.

Close by his cheek, a soft-drink can be seen wedged between the limb and the trunk.

"Oh, sweet Jesus yes. Come on, can." Graham whispered into the bark.

Still, a child might have left it.

He climbed higher on his side of the tree, dicey work on small branches, and moved around until he could look down on the big limb.

A patch of outer bark on the upper side of the limb was shaved away, leaving a field of green inner bark the size of a playing card. Centred in the green rectangle, carved through to the white wood, Graham saw this: 中

It was done carefully and cleanly with a very sharp knife. It was not the work of a child. Graham photographed the mark, carefully bracketing his exposures.

The view from the big limb was good, and it had been improved: the stub of a small branch jutted down from the limb above. It had been clipped off to clear the view. The fibres were compressed and the end slightly flattened in the cutting.

Graham looked for the severed branch. If it had been on the ground, he would have seen it. There, tangled in the limbs below, brown withered leaves amid the green foliage.

The laboratory would need both sides of the cut in order to measure the pitch of the cutting edges. That meant coming back here with a saw. He made several photographs of the stub. All the while he mumbled to himself.

I think that after you killed the cat and threw it into the yard, my man, you climbed up here and waited. I think you watched the children and passed the time whittling and dreaming. When night came, you saw them passing their bright windows and you watched the shades go down, and you saw the lights go out one by one. And after a while, you climbed down and went into them. Didn't you? It wouldn't be too hard a climb straight down from the big limb with a flashlight and the bright moon rising.

It was a hard enough climb for Graham. He stuck a twig into the opening of the soft-drink can gently lift it from the crotch of the tree, and descended, holding the twig in his mouth when he had to use both hands.

Back at the housing project, Graham sat for a few minutes looking up at the rows of windows. There appeared to be about a hundred units. It was possible that someone might remember a white stranger in the parking lot late at night. Even though a month had passed, it was well worth trying. To ask every resident, and get it done quickly, he would need the help of the Birmingham police.

He fought the temptation to send the drink can straight to Jimmy Price in Washington. He had to ask the Birmingham police for manpower. It would be better to give them what he had. It would be a straightforward job. Trying for fingerprints etched by acid sweat was another matter. Price could still do it after Birmingham dusted, as long as the can wasn't handled with bare fingers. 

He knew the FBI document section would fall on the carving like a rabid mongoose. Pictures of that for everybody, nothing lost there.  
He called Birmingham Homicide from the Jacobi house. The detectives arrived just as the realtor, Geehan, was ushering in his prospective buyers.


	11. Chapter 11

Attorney Byron Metcalf took off his tie at five o'clock, made himself a drink, and put his feet up on his desk.

"Sure you won't have one?"

"Another time." Graham, unbuttoning his collar, was grateful for the air conditioning.

"I didn't know the Jacobis very well," Metcalf eyed Graham. "They'd only been here three months. My wife and I were there for drinks a couple of times. Ed Jacobi came to me for a new will soon after he was transferred here, that's how I met him."

"But you're his executor."

"Yes. His wife was listed first as executor, then me as an alternate in case she was deceased or infirm. He has a brother in Philadelphia, but I gather they weren't close."

"You were an assistant district attorney."

"Yeah, 1968 to '72. I tan for DA in '72. It was close, but I lost. I'm not sorry now."

"How do you see what happened here, Mr. Metcalf?"

"The first thing I thought about was Joseph Yablonski, the labour leader?" 

Graham nodded.

"A crime with a motive, power, in that case, disguised as an insane attack. We went over Ed Jacobi's papers with a fine-tooth comb-Jerry Estridge from the DA's office and me.

"Nothing. Nobody stood to make much money off Ed Jacobi's death. He made a big salary and he had some patents paying off, but he spent it almost as fast as it came in. Everything was to go to the wife, with a little land in California entailed to the kids and their descendants. He had a small spendthrift trust set up for the surviving son. It'll pay his way through three more years of college. I'm sure he'll still be a freshman by then."

"Niles Jacobi."

"Yeah. The kid gave Ed a big pain in the ass. He lived with his mother in California. Went to Chino for theft. I gather his mother's a flake. Ed went out there to see about him last year. Brought him back to Birmingham and put him in school at Bardwell Community College. Tried to keep him at home, but he dumped on the other kids and made it unpleasant for everybody. Mrs. Jacobi put up with it for a while, but finally, they moved him to a dorm."

"Where was he?"

"On the night of June 28th?" Metcalf's eyes were hooded as he looked at Graham. "The police wondered about that, and so did I. He went to a movie and then back to school. It's verified. Besides, he has type-O blood. Mr. Graham, I have to pick up my wife in half an hour. We can talk tomorrow if you like. Tell me how I can help you."

"I'd like to see the Jacobis' personal effects. Diaries, pictures, whatever."

"There's not much of that- they lost about everything in a fire in Detroit before they moved down here. Nothing suspicious - Ed was welding in the basement and the sparks got into some paint he had stored down there and the house went up.

"There's some personal correspondence. I have it in the lock boxes with the small valuables. I don't remember any diaries. Everything else is in storage. Niles may have some pictures, but I doubt it. Tell you what- I'm going to court at nine-thirty in the morning, but I could get you into the bank to look at the stuff and come back by for you afterward."

"Thank you," Graham said. "One other thing. I could use copies of everything to do with the probate: claims against the estate, any contest of the will, correspondence. I'd like to have all the paper."

"The Atlanta DA's office asked me for that already. They're comparing with the Leeds estate in Atlanta, I know," Metcalf said.

"Still, I'd like copies for myself."

"Okay, copies to you. You don't really think it's money, though, do you?" 

"No. I just keep hoping the same name will come up here and in Atlanta." 

"So do I."  
~~~~~~  
Student housing at Bardwell Community College was four small dormitory buildings set around a littered quadrangle of beaten earth. 

A stereo war was in progress when Graham got there.

Opposing sets of speakers on the motel-style balconies blared at each other across the quad. Students loitered on dirty grass, a nearby crowd cheered loudly. Water balloons arched high in the air and burst on the ground ten feet from Graham.

He ducked under a clothesline and stepped over a bicycle to get through the sitting room of the suite Niles Jacobi shared. The door to Jacobi's bedroom was ajar and music blasted through the crack. Graham knocked.

No response.

He pushed open the door. A tall boy with a freckled face sat on one of the twin beds sucking on a four-foot bong pipe. His shirtless mate lay on the other bed.

The boy's head jerked around to face Graham. He was struggling to think. 

"I'm looking for Niles Jacobi."

The boy appeared stupefied. Graham switched off the stereo.

"I'm looking for Niles Jacobi."

"Just some stuff for my asthma, man. Don't you ever knock?"

"Where's Niles Jacobi?"

"Fuck if I know. What do you want him for?"

Graham showed him the tin. "Try real hard to remember."

"Oh, shit," the other boy said.

"Narc, goddammit. I ain't worth it, look, let's talk about this a minute, man."

"Let's talk about where Jacobi is."

"I think I can find out for you," shirtless answered. Graham waited while he asked in the other rooms. Everywhere he went, commodes flushed.

There were few traces of Niles Jacobi in the room- one photograph of the Jacobi family lay on a dresser. Graham lifted a glass of melting ice off it and wiped away the wet ring with his sleeve.

A dark-haired boy the age of Josh stared back at him.

Shirtless returned. "Try the Hateful Snake," he said.  
~~~~~~  
The Hateful Snake club was in a storefront with the windows painted dark green. The vehicles parked outside were an odd assortment, big trucks looking bobtailed without their trailers, compact cars, a cornflower convertible, old Dodges and Chevrolets crippled with a high rear end for the drag-strip look, four full-dress Harley-Davidsons.

An air conditioner, mounted in the transom over the door, dripped steadily onto the sidewalk.

Graham ducked around the dribble and went inside.

The place was jarring and smelled of stale cigarettes and sex. The bartender, a scantily-clad and enveloped in darkness, was the only women not stripping.

Niles Jacobi, tall and razor-thin, sat facing the stage. He took the money out, but the man beside him threw it at the women.

Jacobi looked like a dissolute schoolboy, but the one beside did not.

Jacobi's companion was a strange mixture; he had a boyish face on a taut, muscular body. He wore a T-shirt and jeans, worn white over the objects in his pockets. His arms were thick with muscle, and he had large, long hands. One professional tattoo on his left forearm said: "Born to F*ck." A crude jailhouse tattoo on his other arm said "Randy." His short jail haircut had grown out unevenly. As he dug for a smoke, Graham saw a small shaved patch on his forearm. Graham watched the pair rise as Niles' pocket thinned 

He followed Niles Jacobi and "Randy" through the crowd to the back of the room. They sat in a booth.

Graham stopped two feet from the table.

"Niles, my name is Will Graham. I need to talk with you for a few minutes."

Randy looked up with a bright false smile. An old scar marred his left brow. "Do I know you?"

"No. Niles, I want to talk to you."

Niles arched a quizzical eyebrow. Graham wondered what had happened to him in Chino.

"We were having a private conversation here. Butt out," Randy said, he took a deep swig and blew in Graham's face.

Graham crinkled his nose but didn't back off. Through the billow of smoke, he could make out bruised muscular forearms, the dot of adhesive in the crook of the elbow, the shaved patch where Randy had tested the edge of his knife. Knife fighter's mange.

I'm afraid of Randy. Fire or fall back.

"Did you hear me?" Randy sensed it. "F*ck off."

Graham worried his lip. He reached into his jacket and put his identification on the table. "Sit still, Randy. If you try to get up, you're gonna have two navels."

"I'm sorry, sir." Instant inmate sincerity.

"Randy, I want you to do something for me. I want you to reach in your left back pocket. Just use two fingers. You'll find a five-inch knife in there with a Flicket clamped to the blade. Please put it on the table...Thank you."

Graham dropped the knife into his pocket. It felt heavy. "Now, in your other pocket is your wallet. Get it out. You sold some blood today, didn't you?"

"So what?"

"So hand me the slip they gave you, the one you show next time at the blood bank. Spread it out on the table."

Randy had type-O blood. Scratch Randy. "How long have you been out of jail?" 

"Three weeks."

"Who's your parole officer?"

"I'm not on parole."

"That's probably a lie." Graham wanted to roust Randy. He could get him for carrying a knife over the legal length. Being in a place with a liquor license was a parole violation. But Graham knew he was angry at Randy because he had feared him.

"Randy."

"Yeah."

"Get out."  
~~~~~~  
"I don't know what I can tell you, I didn't know my father very well," Niles Jacobi said as Graham drove him to the school. At first, he wasn't planning on saying anything, but now he finds himself wanting to blurt everything out; to this stranger. "He left Mother when I was three, and I didn't see him after that." 

"Your mother wouldn't have it."

"...Yeah." 

"He came to see you last spring."

"Yes."

"At Chino."

"You know about that."

"I'm just trying to get it straight. What happened?"

Niles decided that this wasn't an ordinary stranger. Graham was soft-spoken, he questioned kindly and Niles wanted to answer. "...Well, there he was in Visitors, uptight and trying not to look around - so many people treat it like the zoo. I'd heard a lot about him from Mother, but he didn't look so bad. He was just a man standing there in a tacky sports coat." 

"What did he say?"

"Well, I expected him either to jump right in my shit or to be really guilty, that's the way it goes mostly in Visitors. But he just asked me if I thought I could go to school. He said he'd go custody if I'd go to school. And try. 'You have to help yourself a little. Try and help yourself, and I'll see you get in school,' and like that."

"How long before you got out?"

"Two weeks."

They stopped at a red light and Graham turned his head to study Niles.

"Niles, did you ever talk about your family while you were in Chino? To your cellmates or anybody?"

Niles Jacobi looked at Graham quickly. "Oh. Oh, I see. No. Not about my father. I hadn't thought about him in years, why would I talk about him?"

"How about here? Did you ever take any of your friends over to your parents' house?"

"Parent, not parents. She was not my mother."

"Did you ever take anybody over there? School friends or..."

"Or rough trade, Officer Graham?"

"Yes, That's right."

"No."

"...Never?"

"Not once."

"Did he ever mention any kind of threat, was he ever disturbed about anything in the last month or two before it happened?"

"He was disturbed the last time I talked to him, but it was just my grades. I had a lot of cuts. He bought me two alarm clocks. There wasn't anything else that I know of."

"Do you have any personal papers of his, correspondence, photographs, anything?"

"No."

"You have a picture of the family. It's on the dresser in your room. Near the bong." 

"That's not my bong. I wouldn't put that filthy thing in my mouth."

"I need the picture. I'll have it copied and send it back to you. What else do you  
have?"

Jacobi shook a cigarette out of his pack and patted his pockets for matches. "That's all. I can't imagine why they gave that to me. My father smiling at Mrs. Jacobi and all the little Munchkins. You can have it. He never looked like that to me."

"Niles," Graham started.

"Yeah?"

"Stay in school."  
~~~~~~  
Graham needed to know the Jacobis. His new acquaintances in Birmingham were little help.

Byron Metcalf gave him the run of the lockboxes. He read the thin stack of letters, mostly business, and poked through the jewelry and the silver.

For three days, he worked in the warehouse where the Jacobis' household goods were stored. Metcalf helped him at night. Every crate on every pallet was opened and then examined. Police photographs helped Graham see where things had been in the house.

Most of the furnishings were new, bought with the insurance from the Detroit fire. The Jacobis hardly had time to leave their marks on their possessions.

One item, a bedside table with traces of fingerprint powder still on it, held Graham's attention. In the center of the tabletop was a blob of green wax.

For the second time, he wondered if the killer liked candlelight.

The Birmingham forensics unit were good sports about sharing.

The blurred print of the end of a nose was the best Birmingham and Jimmy Price in Washington could do with the soft-drink can from the tree.

The FBI laboratory's Firearms and Toolmarks section reported on the severed branch. The blades that clipped it was thick, with a shallow pitch: it had been done with a bolt cutter.

Document section had referred the mark cut in the bark to the Asian Studies department at Langley.

Graham sat on a packing case at the warehouse and read the long report. Asian Studies advised that the mark was a Chinese character which meant "You hit it" or "You hit it on the head"- an expression sometimes used in gambling. It was considered a "positive" or "lucky" sign. 

The character also appeared on a Mah-Jongg piece, the Asian scholars said. It marked the Red Dragon. Graham's parasites were roaming. he needed to see Lecter again.


	12. Chapter 12

Crawford at FBI headquarters in Washington was on the telephone with Graham at the Birmingham airport when his secretary leaned into the office and flagged his attention.

"Dr. Chilton at Chesapeake Hospital in 2706. He says it's urgent." Crawford nodded. "Hang on, Will." He punched the telephone.

"Crawford."

"Frederick Chilton, Mr. Crawford, at the-"

"I know, doctor."

"I have a note here, or two pieces of a note, that appears to be from the man who killed those people in Atlanta and-"

"Where did you get it?"

"From Hannibal Lecter's cell. It's written on toilet tissue, of all things, and it has teeth marks pressed in it."

"Can you read it to me without handling it any more?" Straining to sound calm, Chilton read it:

My dear Dr. Lecter,  
I wanted to tell you I'm delighted that you have taken an interest in me. And when I learned of your vast correspondence I thought, dare I? Of course, I do. I don't believe you'd tell them who I am, even if you knew. Besides, what particular body I currently occupy is trivia.  
The important thing is what I am becoming. I know that you alone can understand this. I have some things I'd love to show you. Someday, perhaps, if circumstances permit. I hope we can correspond...

"Mr. Crawford, there's a hole torn and punched out. Then it says:

I have admired you for years and have a complete collection of your press notices. Actually, I think of them as unfair reviews. As unfair as mine. They like to sling demeaning nicknames, don't they? The Tooth Fairy. What could be more inappropriate? It would shame me for you to see that if I didn't know you had suffered the same distortions in the press.  
Investigator Graham interests me. Odd-looking for a flatfoot, too lean, but so angelic; cute isn't he?  
You should have taught him not to meddle.  
Forgive the stationery. I chose it because it will dissolve very quickly if you should have to swallow it.

"There's a piece missing here, Mr. Crawford. I'll read the bottom part:

If I hear from you, next time I might send you something wet. Until then I  
remain your Avid Fan

Silence after Chilton finished reading. “Are you there?”

“Yes. Does Lecter know you have the note?”

“Not yet. This morning he was moved to a holding cell while his quarters were cleaned. Instead of using a proper rag, the cleaning man was pulling handfuls of toilet paper off the roll to wipe down the sink. He found the note wound up in the roll and brought it to me. They bring me anything they find hidden.”

“Where’s Lecter now?”

“Still in the holding cell.”

“Can he see his quarters at all from there.” 

“Let me think...No, no, he can’t.”

“Wait for a second, Doctor.” Crawford put Chilton on hold. He stared at the two winking buttons on his telephone for several seconds without seeing them. Crawford, fisher of men, was watching his cork move against the current. He called his hound.

“Will...a note, maybe from the Tooth Fairy, hidden in Lecter’s cell at Chesapeake. Sounds like a fan letter. He wants Lecter’s approval, he’s curious about you. He’s asking questions.”

“...How was Lecter supposed to answer?”

“Don’t know yet. Part’s torn out, a part’s scratched out. Looks like there’s a chance of correspondence as long as Lecter’s not aware that we know. I want the note for the lab and I want to toss his cell, but it’ll be risky. If Lecter gets wise, who knows how he could warn the bastard? We need the link but we need the note too.”

Crawford told Graham where Lecter was held, how the note was found. “It’s eighty miles over to Chesapeake. I can’t wait for you, buddy. What do you think?”

“Ten people died in a month- we can’t play his game. Let me through to Chilton.” 

“I am,” Crawford said.

“See you in two hours.”

Crawford hailed his secretary. “Jane, order a helicopter. I want the next thing smoking and I don’t care whose it is- ours, DCPD or Marines. I’ll be on the roof in five minutes. Call Documents, tell them to have a documented case up there. Tell Herbert to scramble a search team. On the roof. Five minutes.”

He redirected Chilton into a threeway, Graham's voice filtered through immediately. 

“Dr. Chilton, we have to search Lecter’s cell without his knowledge and we need your help. Have you mentioned this to anybody else?”

“Officer Graham?

"Yes, doctor."

"No, I have not.”

“Where’s the cleaning man who found the note?”

"He's here in my office."

“Keep him there, please, and tell him to keep quiet. How long has Lecter been out of his cell?”

“About half an hour.”

“Is that unusually long?”

“No, not yet. But it takes only about a half-hour to clean it. Soon he’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong.”

“Okay, do this for me: Call your building superintendent or engineer, whoever's in charge; to shut off the water in the building and to pull the circuit breakers on Lecter’s hall. Have a crew walk down the hall past the holding cell carrying tools. They’ll be in a hurry, pissed off, too busy to answer any questions- got it? Tell him he’ll get an explanation from me. Get the garbage pickup cancelled for today. Don’t touch the note, okay? Crawford's coming.”

Crawford stopped and redirected to call the section chief, Scientific Analysis. 

“Brian, I have a note coming in on the fly, possibly from the Tooth Fairy. Number-one priority. It has to go back where it came from within the hour and unmarked. It’ll go to Hair and Fiber, Latent Prints, and Documents, then to you, coordinate with them, will you?... Sure I will. I’ll walk it through. I’ll deliver it to you myself.”  
~~~~~~  
It was warm- the federally mandated eighty degrees- in the elevator when Crawford came down from the roof with the note, his hair blown silly by the helicopter blast. He was mopping his face by the time he reached the Hair and Fiber section of the laboratory.

Hair and Fiber is a small section, calm and busy. The common room stacked with boxes of evidence sent by police departments all over the country; swatches of tape that have sealed mouths and bound wrists, torn and stained clothing, deathbed sheets.

Crawford spotted Joseph Katz through the window of an examining room as he wove his way between the boxes. He had a pair of child's coveralls suspended from a hanger over a table covered with white paper. Working under bright lights in the draft-free room, he brushed the coveralls with a metal spatula, carefully working with the wale and across it, with the nap and against it. A sprinkle of dirt and sand fell to the paper. With it, falling through the still air more slowly than sand but faster than lint, came a tightly coiled hair. he curled his lips.

Crawford pecked on the glass and he came out fast, stripping off his white gloves. "It hasn't been printed yet, right?"

"No."

"I'm set up in the next examining room." He put on a fresh pair of gloves while Crawford opened the document case.

The note, in two pieces, was contained gently between two sheets of plastic film. Joseph Katz saw the tooth impressions and glanced up at Crawford, not wasting time with the question.

He nodded: the impressions matched the clear overlay of the killer's bite he had carried with him to Chesapeake.

Crawford watched through the window as he lifted the note on a slender dowel and hung it over white paper. He looked it over with a powerful glass, then fanned it gently. He tapped the dowel with the edge of a spatula and went over the paper beneath it with the magnifying glass.

Crawford looked at his watch.

Katz flipped the note over another dowel to get the reverse side up. He removed one tiny object from its surface with tweezers almost as fine as a hair.

He photographed the torn ends of the note under high magnification and returned it to its case. He put a clean pair of white gloves in the case with it. The white gloves- the signal not to touch- would always be beside the evidence until it was checked for fingerprints.

"That's it," he said, handing the case back to Crawford. "One hair, maybe a thirty- second of an inch. A couple of blue grains. I'll work it up. What else have you got?"

Crawford gave him three marked envelopes. "Hair from Lecter's comb. Whiskers from the electric razor they let him use. This is a hair from the cleaning man. Gotta go."

"See you later," Katz said.  
~~~~~~  
Jimmy Price in Latent Fingerprints winced at the sight of the porous toilet paper. He squinted fiercely over the shoulder of his technician operating the helium-cadmium laser as they tried to find a fingerprint and make it fluoresce. Glowing smudges appeared on the paper, perspiration stains, nothing.

Crawford started to ask him a question, thought better of it, waited with the blue light reflecting off his glasses.

"We know three guys handled this without gloves, right?" Price said.

"Yeah, the cleanup man, Lecter, and Chilton."

"The fellow scrubbing sinks probably had washed the oil off his fingers. But the others- this stuff is terrible." Price held the paper to the light, forceps steady in his mottled old hand. "I could fume it, Jack, but I couldn't guarantee the iodine stains would fade out in the time you've got."

"Ninhydrin? Boost it with heat?" Ordinarily, Crawford would not have ventured a technical suggestion to Price, but he was floundering for anything. He expected a huffy reply, but the old man sounded rueful and sad.

"No. We couldn't wash it after. I can't get you a print off this, Jack. There isn't one."

"F*ck," Crawford said.

The old man turned away. Crawford put his hand on Price's bony shoulder. "Hell, Jimmy. If there was one, you'd have found it."

Price didn't answer. He was unpacking a pair of hands that had arrived in another matter. Dry ice smoked in his wastebasket. 

Crawford dropped the white gloves into the smoke.  
~~~~~~  
Disappointment growling in his stomach, Crawford hurried on to Documents where Lloyd Bowman was waiting. Bowman had been called out of court and the abrupt shear in his concentration left him blinking like a man just wakened. His hands were quick and careful as he transferred the note to his work surface. "How long do I have?"

"Twenty minutes max."

The two pieces of the note seemed to glow under Bowman's lights. His blotter showed dark green through a jagged oblong hole in the upper piece.

"The main thing, the first thing, is how Lecter was to reply," Crawford said when Bowman had finished reading.

"Instructions for answering were probably in the part torn out." Bowman worked steadily with his lights and filters and copy camera as he talked. "Here in the top piece, he says 'I hope we can correspond...' and then the hole begins. Lecter scratched over that with a felt-tip pen and then folded it and pinched most of it out."

"He doesn't have anything to cut with."

Bowman photographed the tooth impressions and the back of the note under extremely oblique light, his shadow leaping from wall to wall as he moved the light through 360 degrees around the paper and his hands made phantom folding motions in the air. 

"Now we can mash just a little." Bowman put the note between two panes of glass to flatten the jagged edges of the hole. The tatters were smeared with vermilion ink. He was chanting under his breath. On the third repetition, Crawford made out what he was saying. 

"You're so sly, but so am I."

Bowman switched filters on his small television camera and focused it on the note. He darkened the room until there was only the dull red glow of a lamp and the blue-green of his monitor screen.

The words "I hope we can correspond" and the jagged hole appeared enlarged on the screen. The ink smear was gone, and on the tattered edges appeared fragments of writing.

"Aniline dyes in coloured inks are transparent to infrared," Bowman said. "These could be the tips of T's here and here. On the end is the tail of what could be an M or N, or possibly an R." Bowman took a photograph and turned the lights on. "Jack, there are just two common ways of carrying on communication that's one-way blind- the phone and publication. Could Lecter take a fast phone call?"

"He can take calls, but it's slow and they have to come in through the hospital switchboard."

"Publication is the only safe way, then."

"We know this sweetheart reads the Tattler. The stuff about Graham and Lecter was in the Tattler. I don't know of any other paper that carried it."

"Three Ts and an R in Tattler. Personal column, you think? It's a place to look."

Crawford checked with the FBI library, then telephoned instructions to the Chicago field office.

Bowman handed him the case as he finished.

"The Tattler comes out this evening," Crawford said. "It's printed in Chicago on Mondays and Thursdays. We'll get proofs of the classified pages."

"I'll have some more stuff-minor, I think," Bowman said.

"Anything useful, fire it straight to Chicago. Fill me in when I get back from the asylum," Crawford said on his way out the door.


	13. Chapter 13

The turnstile at Washington's Metro Central spit Graham's fare card back to him and he came out into the hot afternoon carrying his flight bag.

The J. Edgar Hoover Building looked like a great concrete cage above the heat shimmer on Tenth Street. The FBI's move to the new headquarters had been underway when Graham left Washington. He had never worked there.

Crawford met him at the escort desk off the underground driveway to augment Graham's hastily issued credentials with his own. Graham looked pale and tired, he was oddly patient with the signing-in. Crawford wondered how he felt, knowing that another killer was on to him.

Graham has issued a magnetically encoded tag like the one on Crawford's vest. He plugged it into the gate and passed into the long white corridors. Crawford took his flight bag.

"I forgot to send a car for you."

"Probably quicker this way. Did you get the note back to Lecter all right?"

"Yeah," Crawford said. "We followed your instructions. Poured water on the hall floor. Faked a broken pipe and electrical shortage. We had Simmons mopping when Lecter was brought back to his cell. They think he bought it."

"I kept wondering on the plane if Lecter wrote it himself."

"That bothered me too until I looked at it. Bite mark in the paper matches the ones on the women. Also, it's ball-point, which Lecter doesn't have. The person who wrote it had read the Tattler, and Lecter hasn't had a Tattler. Rankin and Willingham tossed the cell. Beautiful job, but they didn't find diddly. They took Polaroids first to get everything back just right. Then the cleaning man went in and did what he always does."

"So what do you think?"

"As far as physical evidence toward an ID, the note is pretty much dreck," Crawford said. "Some way we've got to make the contract work for us, but damn if I know how yet. We'll get the rest of the lab results in a few minutes."

"You've got the mail and phone covered at the hospital?"

"Standing trace-and-tape order for any time Lecter's on the phone. He made a call on Saturday afternoon. He told Chilton he was calling his lawyer. It's a damn WATS line, and I can't be sure."

"What did his lawyer say?"

"Nothing. We got a leased line to the hospital switchboard for Lecter's convenience in the future, so that won't get by us again. We'll fiddle with his mail both ways, starting next delivery. No problem with warrants, thank God."

Crawford bellied up to a door and stuck the tag on his vest into the lock slot. "My new office. Come on in. The decorator had some paint left over from a battleship he was doing. Here's the note. This print is exactly the size."

Graham read it slowly. Seeing the spidery lines spell his name started a high tone ringing in his head. Deja vu.

Crawford fidgeted at his desk before opening a drawer to retrieve a jar of tablets. He tried to concentrate on Graham. "You think they'll let you see Lecter again?"

Graham's closed his eyes slowly, fingering the note. "I don't know." 

"When's the next time you'll go?"

"I don't know."

Crawford fumed. In all his years spent with Will Graham, he never really understood the man. Sure, Crawford could read most of his emotions better than anyone else; but, he could not understand their reasoning.  
Why did Graham have to visit that bloody psycho to get leads? He can work fine keeping far away from that sort of trouble.

Graham's incoherent mumbling interrupted the mute atmosphere. 

Crawford sighed loudly for his attention. "The library confirms the Tattler is the only paper that carried a story about Lecter and you," Crawford said, hoisting himself up to fetch a kettle. He began fixing himself an Alka-Seltzer.  
"Want one of these? Good for you."

Graham shook his head, eyes trained on the message again. 

"It was published Monday night a week ago. It was on the stands Tuesday nationwide- some areas not till Wednesday- Alaska and Maine and places. The Tooth Fairy got one- couldn't have done it before Tuesday. He reads it, writes to Lecter. Rankin and Willingham are still sifting the hospital trash for the envelope. Bad job. They don't separate the papers from the diapers at Chesapeake."

"All right, Lecter gets the note from the Tooth Fairy no sooner than Wednesday. He tears out the part about how to reply and scratches over and pokes out one earlier reference- I don't know why he didn't tear that out too."

"It was in the middle of a paragraph full of compliments," Graham said. "He couldn't stand to ruin them. That's why he didn't throw the whole thing away." Graham rubbed his temples with his knuckles. 

"Bowman thinks Lecter will use the Tattler to answer the Tooth Fairy. He says that's probably the setup. You think he'd answer this thing?"

"Sure. He's a great correspondent. Pen pals all over."

"If they're using the Tattler, Lecter would barely have time to get his answer in the issue they'll print tonight, even if he sent it special delivery to the paper the same day he got the Tooth Fairy's note. Chester from the Chicago office is down at the Tattler checking the ads. The printers are putting the paper together right now."

"Please don't stir the Tattler up," Graham said.

"The shop foreman thinks Chester's a realtor trying to get a jump on the ads. He's selling him the proof sheets under the table, one by one as they come off. We're getting everything, all the classifieds, just to blow some smoke. All right, say we find out how Lecter was to answer and we can duplicate the method. Then we can fake a message to the Tooth Fairy- but what do we say? How do we use it?"

"The obvious thing is to try to get him to come to a mail drop," Graham said. "Bait him with something he'd like to see. 'Important evidence' that Lecter knows about from talking to me. Some mistake he made that we're waiting for him to repeat."

"He'd be a fool to go for it."

Graham bit on his lower lip, when he began speaking again; there was a robotic quality to his tone. "I know. Want to hear what the best bait would be?" 

"I'm not sure I do."

"Lecter would be the best bait," Graham said.

Crawford sipped slowly. "Set up how?"

"It would be hell to do, I know that. We'd take Lecter into federal custody- Chilton would never sit still for this at Chesapeake- and we stash him in maximum security at a VA psychiatric hospital. We fake an escape."

"Oh, Jesus... "

"We send the Tooth Fairy a message in next week's Tattler, after the big 'escape.' It would be Lecter asking him for a rendezvous."

"Why in God's name would anybody want to meet Lecter? I mean, even the Tooth Fairy?"

"To kill him, Jack." Graham got up. There was no window to look out of as he talked. He stood in front of the "Ten Most Wanted," Crawford's only wall decoration.  
"See, the Tooth Fairy could absorb him that way, engulf him, become more than he is."

"You sound pretty sure."

"I'm not sure. Who's sure? What he said in the note was 'I have some things I'd love to show you. Someday, perhaps, if circumstances permit.' Maybe it was a serious invitation. I don't think he was just being polite."

"Wonder what he's got to show? The victims were intact. Nothing missing but a little skin and hair and that was probably...How did Bloom put it?"

"Ingested," Graham said. He sat down once again, his head lowered. "I'm not sure Lecter would draw the Tooth Fairy, Jack. I say it's the best shot."

"We'd have a goddamn stampede if people thought Lecter was out. Papers all over us screaming. Best shot, maybe, but we'll save it for last."

"He probably wouldn't come near a mail drop, but he might be curious enough to look at a mail drop to see if Lecter had sold him. If he could do it from a distance. We could pick a drop that could be watched from only a few places a long way off and stake out the observation points."  
It sounded weak to Graham even as he said it.

"Secret Service has a setup they've never used. They'd let us have it. But if we don't put an ad in today, we'll have to wait until Monday before the next issue comes out. Presses roll at five our time. That gives Chicago another hour and fifteen minutes to come up with Lecter's ad if there is one.

"What about Lecter's ad order, the letter he'd have sent the Tattler ordering the ad- could we get to that quicker?"

"Chicago put out some general feelers to the shop foreman," Crawford said. "The mail stays in the classified advertising manager's office. They sell the names and return addresses to mailing lists- outfits that sell products for lonely people, love charms, rooster pills, squack dealers, 'meet beautiful Asian girls,' personality quizzes, that sort of stuff.

"We might appeal to the ad manager's citizenship and all and get a look, request him to be quiet, but I don't want to chance it and risk the Tattler slobbering all over us. It would take a warrant to go in there and Bogart the mail. I'm thinking about it."

"If Chicago turns up nothing, we could put an ad in any way. If we're wrong about the Tattler, we wouldn't lose anything," Graham said.

"And if we're right that the Tattler is the medium and we make up a reply based on what we have in this note and screw it up- if it doesn't look right to him- we're down the tubes. I didn't ask you about Birmingham. Anything?"

"Birmingham's shut down and over with. The Jacobi house has been painted and redecorated and it's on the market. Their stuff is in storage waiting for probate. I went through the crates. The people I talked to didn't know the Jacobis very well. The one thing they always mentioned was how affectionate the Jacobis were to each other. Always patting. Nothing left of them now but five pallet loads of stuff in a warehouse. I wish I had-"

"Quit wishing, you're on it now."

"What about the mark on the tree?"

"You hit it on the head'? Means nothing to me," Crawford said. "The Red Dragon either. Katz knows Mah-Jongg. We know from his hair he's not Chinese."

"He cut the limb with a bolt cutter. I don't see-"

Crawford's telephone rang. He spoke into it briefly.

"Lab's ready on the note, Will. Let's go up to Zeller's office. It's bigger and not so gray."  
~~~~~~  
Lloyd Bowman, dry as a document in spite of the heat, caught up with them in the corridor. He was flapping damp photographs in each hand and held a sheaf of Datafax sheets under his arm. "Jack, I have to be in court at four-fifteen," he said as he flapped ahead. "It's that paper hanger Nilton Eskew and his sweetheart, Nan. She could draw a Treasury note freehand. They've been driving me crazy for two years making their own traveller's checks on a colour Xerox. Won't leave home without them. Will I make it in time, or should I call the prosecutor?"

"You'll make it," Crawford said. "Here we are."

Joseph Katz smiled at Graham from the couch in Zeller's office, making up for the scowl of Price beside him. Katz had always liked Graham, he was high-maintenance but Katz understood Crawford, Graham was intriguing. 

Scientific Analysis Section Chief Brian Zeller was young for his job, but already his hair was thinning and he wore bifocals. On the shelf behind Zeller's desk, Graham saw H. J. Walls's forensic science text, Tedeschi's great Forensic Medicine in three volumes, and an antique edition of Hopkins' The Wreck of the Deutschland.

"Will, we met once at GWU I think," he said. "Do you know everybody?"

Crawford leaned against the corner of Zeller's desk, his arms folded. 

"Anybody got a blockbuster? Okay, did anything you find indicate the note did not come from the Tooth Fairy?"

"No," Bowman said. "I talked to Chicago a few minutes ago to give them some numerals I picked up from an impression on the back of the note. Six-six-six. I'll show you when we get to it. Chicago has over two hundred personal ads so far." He handed Graham a sheaf of Datafax copies. "I've read them and they're all the usual stuff- marriage offers appeals to runaways. I'm not sure how we'd recognize the ad if it's here."

Crawford shook his head. "I don't know either. Let's break down the physical. Now, Jimmy Price did everything we could do and there was no print. What about you, Katz?"

"I got one whisker. Scale count and core size match samples from Hannibal Lecter. So does colour. The colour's markedly different from samples taken in Birmingham and Atlanta. Three blue grains and some dark flecks went to Brian's end." He raised his eyebrows at Brian Zeller.

"The grains were commercial granulated cleaner with chlorine," he said. "It must have come off the cleaning man's hands. There were several very minute particles of dried blood. It's definitely blood, but there's not enough to type."

"The tears at the end of the pieces wandered off the perforations," Joseph Katz continued. "If we find the roll in somebody's possession and he hasn't torn it again, we can get a definite match. I recommend issuing an advisory now, so the arresting officers will be sure to search for the roll."

Crawford nodded. "Bowman?"

"Jane from my office went after the paper and got samples to match. It's toilet tissue for marine heads and motorhomes. The texture matches brand name Wedeker manufactured in Minneapolis. It has nationwide distribution."

Bowman set up his photographs on an easel near the windows. "On the handwriting itself, this is a right-handed person using his left hand and printing in a deliberate block pattern. You can see the unsteadiness in the strokes and varying letter sizes."

"The proportions make me think our man has a touch of uncorrected astigmatism." 

"The inks on both pieces of the note look like the same standard ball-point royal blue in natural light, but a slight difference appears under coloured filters. He used two pens, changing somewhere in the missing section of the note. You can see where the first one began to skip. The first pen is not used frequently- see the blob it starts with? It might have been stored point-down and uncapped in a pencil jar or canister, which suggests a desk situation. Also the surface the paper lay on was soft enough to be a blotter. A blotter might retain impressions if you find it. I want to add the blotter to Joseph's advisory."

Bowman flipped to a photograph of the back of the note. The extreme enlargement made the paper look fuzzy. It was grooved with shadowed impressions. "He folded the note to write the bottom part, including what was later torn out. In this enlargement of the back side, oblique light reveals a few impressions. We can make out '666 an.' Maybe that's where he had pen trouble and had to bear down and overwrite. I didn't spot it until I had this high-contrast print. There's no 666 in any ad so far."  
"The sentence structure is orderly, and there's no rambling. The folds suggest it was delivered in a standard letter-size envelope. These two dark places are printing-ink smudges. The note was probably folded inside some innocuous printed matter in the envelope."  
"That's about it," Bowman said. "Unless you have questions, Jack, I'd better go to the courthouse. I'll check in after I testify."

"Sink 'em deep," Crawford offered.

Graham studied the Tattler personals column. ("Attractive queen-size lady, young 52, seeks Christian Leo nonsmoker 40 - 70. No children, please. Artificial limb welcomed. No phonies. Send photo first letter.")

Lost in the pain and desperation of the ads, he didn't notice that the others were leaving until Joseph Katz spoke to him.

"I'm sorry. What did you say?" He looked at him and tried to smile.

"I just said I'm glad to see you back, Champ. You're looking good."

"Thanks, Katz."

"Saul's going to cooking school. He's still hit-or-miss, but when the dust settles come over and let him practice on you."

"...Yes."

Zeller went away to prowl his laboratory. Only Crawford and Graham were left, looking at the clock.

"Forty minutes to Tattler press time," Crawford said. "I'm going after their mail. What do you say?"

"I think you have to."

Crawford passed the word to Chicago on Zeller's telephone. "Will, we need to be ready with a substitute ad if Chicago bingoes."

"I'll work on it."

"I'll set up the drop," Crawford called the Secret Service and talked at some length. Graham was still scribbling when he finished.

"Okay, the mail drop's a beauty," Crawford said at last. "It's an outside message box on a fire-extinguisher-service outfit in Annapolis. That's Lecter territory. The Tooth Fairy will see that it's something Lecter could know about Alphabetical pigeonholes. The service people drive up to it and get assignments and mail. Our boy can check it out from a park across the street. Secret Service swears it looks good. They set it up to catch a counterfeiter, but it turned out they didn't need it. Here's the address. What about the message?"

"We have to use two messages in the same edition. The first one warns the Tooth Fairy that his enemies are closer than he thinks. It tells him he made a bad mistake in Atlanta and if he repeats the mistake he's doomed. It tells him Lecter has mailed 'secret information' I showed Lecter about what we're doing, how close we are, the leads we have. It directs the Tooth Fairy to a second message that begins with 'your signature.'"

"The second message begins 'Avid Fan...' and contains the address of the mail drop. We have to do it that way. Even in a roundabout language, the warning in the first message is going to excite some casual nuts. If they can't find out the address, they can't come to the drop and screw things up."

"Good. Damn good. Want to wait it out in my office?"

"I'd rather be doing something. I need to see Brian Zeller."

"Go ahead, I can get you in a hurry if I have to." Graham found the section chief in Serology.

"Brian, could you show me a couple of things?"

"Sure, what?"  
"The samples you used to type the Tooth Fairy."

Zeller looked at Graham through the close-range section of his bifocals. "Was there something in the report you didn't understand?"

"No."  
"Was something unclear?"

"No."

"Something incomplete?" Zeller mouthed the word as if it had an unpleasant taste.

"Your report was fine, couldn't ask for better. I just want to hold the evidence in my hand."

"Ah, certainly. We can do that." Zeller believed that all field men retain the superstitions of the hunt. He was glad to humour Graham. 

"It's all together down at that end."

Graham followed him between the long counters of apparatus. "You're reading Tedeschi."

"Yes," Zeller said over his shoulder. "We don't do any forensic medicine here, as you know, but Tedeschi has a lot of useful things in there. Graham. Will Graham. You wrote the standard monograph on determining the time of death by insect activity, didn't you? Or do I have the right, Graham?"

"I did it." A pause. "You're right, Mant and Nuorteva in the Tedeschi are better on insects."

Zeller was surprised to hear his thought spoken. "Well, it does have more pictures and a table of invasion waves. No offence."

"Of course not. They're better. I told them so."

Zeller gathered vials and slides from a cabinet and a refrigerator and set them on the laboratory counter. "If you want to ask me anything, I'll be where you found me. The stage light on this microscope is on the side here."

Graham did not want the microscope. He doubted none of Zeller's findings. He didn't know what he wanted. He raised the vials and slides to the light, and a glassine envelope with two blond hairs found in Birmingham. A second envelope held three hairs found on Mrs. Leeds.

There were spit and hair and semen on the table in front of Graham and empty air where he tried to see an image, a face, something to replace the shapeless dread he carried.

A woman's voice came from a speaker in the ceiling. "Graham, Will Graham, to Special Agent Crawford's office. On Red."

He found Jane in her headset typing, with Crawford looking over her shoulder.

"Chicago's got an ad order with 666 in it," Crawford said out of the side of his mouth. "They're dictating it to Jane now. They said part of it looks like code."

The lines were climbing out of Jane's typewriter.

Dear Pilgrim,  
You honour me...

"That's it. That's it," Graham said. "Lecter called him a pilgrim when he was talking to me."

You’re very beautiful...

“Christ,” Crawford said.

I offer 100 prayers for your safety.

Find help in John 6:22, 8:16, 9:1; Luke 1:7, 3:1; Galatians 6:11, 15:2; Acis 3:3; Revelation 18:7; Jonah 6:8...

The typing slowed as Jane read back each pair of numbers to the agent in Chicago. When she had finished, the list of scriptural references covered a quarter of a page. It was signed “Bless you, 666.”

“That’s it,” Jane said.

Crawford picked up the phone. “Okay, Chester, how did it go down with the ad manager?...No, you did right...A complete clam, right. Standby at that phone, I’ll get back to you.”

“Code,” Graham said.

“Has to be. We’ve got twenty-two minutes to get a message in if we can break it. Shop foreman needs ten minutes’ notice and three hundred dollars to shoehorn one in this edition. Bowman’s in his office, he got a recess. If you’ll get him cracking, I’ll talk to Cryptography at Langley. Jane, shoot a telex of the ad to CIA cryptography section. I’ll tell ‘em it’s coming.”

Bowman put the message on his desk and aligned it precisely with the corners of his blotter. He polished his rimless spectacles for what seemed to Graham a very long time.

Bowman had a reputation for being quick. Even the explosives section forgave him for not being an ex-Marine and granted him that.

“We have twenty minutes,” Graham said. 

“I understand. You called Langley?” “Crawford did.”

Bowman read the message many times, looked at it upside down and sideways, ran down the margins with his finger. He took a Bible from his shelves. For five minutes the only sounds were the breaths of the two men and the crackle of onionskin pages.

“No,” he said. “We won’t make it in time. Better use what’s left for whatever else you can do.”

Graham showed him an empty hand.

Bowman swivelled around to face Graham and took off his glasses. He had a pink spot on each side of his nose. “Do you feel fairly confident the note to Lecter is the only communication he’s had from your Tooth Fairy?”

“Right.”

“The code is something simple then. They only needed cover against casual readers. Measuring by the perforations in the note to Lecter only about three inches is missing. That’s not much room for instructions. The numbers aren’t right for a jailhouse alphabet grid- the tax code. I’m guessing it’s a book code.”

Crawford joined them. “Book code?”

“Looks like it. The first numeral, that ‘100 prayers,’ could be the page number. The paired numbers in the scriptural references could be line and letter. But what book?”

“Not the Bible?” Crawford said.

“No, not the Bible. I thought it might be at first. Galatians 6:11 threw me off. ‘Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand.’ That’s appropriate, but it’s a coincidence because next, he has Galatians 15:2. Galatians has only six chapters. Same with Jonah 6:8- Jonah has four chapters. He wasn’t using a Bible.”

“Maybe the book title could be concealed in the clear part of Lecter’s message,” Crawford said.

Bowman shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Then the Tooth Fairy named the book to use. He specified it in his note to Lecter,” Graham said.

“It would appear so,” Bowman said. “What about sweating Lecter? In a mental hospital, I would think drugs-“

“They tried sodium amytal on him three years ago trying to find out where he buried a Princeton student,” Graham said. “He gave them a recipe for dip. Besides, if we sweat him we lose the connection. If the Tooth Fairy picked the book, it’s something he knew Lecter would have in his cell.”

“I know for sure he didn’t order one or borrow one from Chilton,” Crawford said.

“What have the papers carried about that, Jack? About Lecter’s books.”

“That he has medical books, psychology books, cookbooks.”

“Then it could be one of the standards in those areas, something so basic the Tooth Fairy knew Lecter would definitely have it,” Bowman said. “We need a list of Lecter’s books. Do you have one?”

“No.” Graham chewed his lip. “I could get Chilton...Wait. Rankin and Willingham, when they tossed his cell, they took Polaroids so they could get everything back in place.”

“Would you ask them to meet me with the pictures of the books?” Bowman said, packing his briefcase.

“Where?”

“The Library of Congress.”

Crawford checked with the CIA cryptography section one last time. The computer at Langley was trying consistent and progressive number-letter substitutions and a staggering variety of alphabet grids. No progress. The cryptographer agreed with Bowman that it was probably a book code.

Crawford looked at his watch. “Will, we’re left with three choices and we’ve got to decide right now. We can pull Lecter’s message out of the paper and run nothing. We can substitute our messages in plain language, inviting the Tooth Fairy to the mail drop. Or we can let Lecter’s ad run as is.”

“Are you sure we can still get Lecter’s message out of the Tattler?”

“Chester thinks the shop foreman would chisel it for about five hundred dollars.”

“I hate to put in a plain-language message, Jack. Lecter would probably never hear from him again.”

“Yeah, but I’m leery of letting Lecter’s message run without knowing what it says,” Crawford said. “What could Lecter tell him that he doesn’t know already? If he found out we have a partial thumbprint and his prints aren’t on file anywhere, he could whittle his thumb and pull his teeth and give us a big gummy laugh in court.”

“The thumbprint wasn’t in the case summary Lecter saw. We better let Lecter’s message run. At least it’ll encourage the Tooth Fairy to contact him again.”

“What if it encourages him to do something besides write?” 

“...We’ll feel sick for a long time,” Graham said bitterly. “We have to do it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, and the long chapter. It's quite arduous to read right now; but, it gets better. I promise.


	14. Chapter 14

In the hour before dawn, Crawford woke from a deep sleep. He did not know why he had awakened until the telephone rang a second time. He found it with no fumbling.

"Jack, this is Lloyd Bowman. I solved the code. You need to know what it says right now."

"Okay, Lloyd." Crawford's feet searched for his slippers.

"It says:  
William Graham, home, Marathon, Florida. Save yourself. Kill them all."

"Goddammit. Gotta go."

"Be careful."

Crawford went to his den without stopping for his robe. He called Florida twice, the airport once, then called Graham at his hotel.

"Will, Bowman just broke the code."

"What did it say?"

"I'll tell you in a second. Now listen to me. Everything is okay. I've taken care of it, so stay on the phone when I tell you."

"Tell me now."

"It's your home address. Lecter gave the bastard your home address.  
Wait,  
Will.  
Sheriff's department has two cars on the way to Sugarloaf right now. Customs launch from Marathon is taking the ocean side. The Tooth Fairy couldn't have done anything in this short time.  
Hold on.  
You can move faster with me helping you. Now, listen to this: The deputies aren't going to scare Molly. The sheriff's cars are just closing the road to the house. Two deputies will move up close enough to watch the house.  
You can call her when she wakes up.  
I'll pick you up in half an hour."

"..."

"The next plane in that direction doesn't go until eight. It'll be quicker to bring them up here. My brother's house on the Chesapeake is available to them. I've got a good plan, Will, wait and hear it. If you don't like it I'll put you on the plane myself."

"I need some things from the armoury."

"We'll get it soon as I pick you up." 

Crawford paused before a painstaking: "I'm sorry man."

Silence on the other end. Before a familiar beep. He hung up.  
~~~~~~  
Molly and Willy were among the first off the plane at the National Airport in Washington. She spotted Graham in the crowd, did not smile, but turned to Josh and said something as they walked swiftly ahead of the stream of tourists returning from Florida.

She looked Graham up and down and approached him gingerly. Graham felt Josh watching. The boy shook hands from a full arm's length away.

Graham made a joke about the weight of Molly's suitcase as they walked to the car.

"I'll carry it," Josh said.

A brown Chevrolet with Maryland plates moved in behind them as they pulled out of the parking lot.

Graham crossed the bridge at Mington and pointed out the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the Washington Monument before heading east toward the Chesapeake Bay. Ten miles outside Washington the brown Chevrolet pulled up beside them in the inside lane. 

The driver looked across with his hand to his mouth and a voice from nowhere crackled in the car. "Officer Graham, you're clean as a whistle. Have a nice trip."

Graham reached under the dash for the concealed microphone. "Roger, much obliged."

The Chevrolet dropped behind them and its turn signal came on. "Just making sure no press cars or anything was following," Graham said.

"I see," Molly replied.

They stopped early in the afternoon and ate at an empty roadside restaurant. Josh went to look at the lobster tank.

"I'm sorry Molly," Graham said.

"Is he after you now?" 

"We've had no reason to think so. Lecter just suggested it to him, urged him to do it."

"I hate it, Will." Molly wept suddenly. 

Graham moved wicker baskets and glasses aside to take her hand across the table. 

"I'm sorry, please Molly...You and Josh will be safe at Crawford's house, I'll stop by often, its a short drive to headquarters...Nobody in the world knows you're there but me and Crawford. It's a nice place-"

"Will, there's something...I want to take Josh and leave here."

"And go where?"

"His grandparents'. They haven't seen him in a while, they'd like to see him."

"Oh."

Molly started rummaging through her purse, leaving his hand to rest limply on the table. She pulled out two plane tickets. They left for Maine tomorrow. 

"Josh, his buddy Tommy's mother had a trash newspaper from the supermarket at their house. Tommy showed it to Josh...It had a lot of stuff about you. About Hobbs, the place you were after that, Lecter, everything.  
Will, I never told him anything prior, that was so wrong of me...Of us!  
It upset him.  
I asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He just asked me if I knew it all along. I said yes, that you and I talked about it once, that you told me everything before we got married. I asked him if he wanted me to tell him about it, the way it really was.  
He said he was...He said he was scared, Will." 

Molly took a deep breath and when she let it out the anger seemed to go with it, leaving her sad and weary. She averted her eyes and Graham's stomach turned to water 

"...Molly please, we can work this out. I'll stop the case immediately. Let's go back to Sugarloaf and forget about this."

"Will, I'm sorry. I, I can't do this... I know I'm being selfish. But Will- I'm scared. I was scared when I met you, then I was scared that every call would be our last...Now, this. I have lived through...with Josh's father once before and, and we can't...I know I'm a coward, Will. I can't help it. I just want to make Josh happy."

"I'm sorry, Molly." I wish I could tell you how sorry. 

So she had made up her mind.

"When are you going?"

"In the morning."

"The dogs?"

"I called the county, Will. I'm sorry, but maybe somebody will take some of them."

Graham felt alarming anguish, he knew that he would never see them again.

"Listen will, If staying here could keep something bad from happening to you, I'd stay. But you can't save anybody, I'm not helping you here. With us up there, you can just think about taking care of yourself."

Something tore, followed by a shortage of breath. 

"Molly, I-"

"Mom!" Josh exclaimed as he appeared by Molly's side. 

Graham managed a raspy greeting that Josh didn't answer.

He watched Molly take Josh out of ear-shot, he tried to read their lips for a few seconds before lowering his head. The suitcase. They had packed everything already. 

Graham could sense the waiter's curiosity through the thin booth they were in. He desperately craved a strong drink, Graham breathed slowly before he could see again. 

Molly had woken up yesterday to the sound of men outside her door. The picket fence that she had repainted with Josh was destroyed on the far left, a police car drove blind over it in the night. 

Molly dispised Jack but She hated Bella Crawford with a passion. She would rather fight a psycho than live in the same house with her. 

Molly called her mother while she packed, Josh complained about his summer plans. Molly and Josh talked and cried together on the six-hour flight to Washington. 

Graham knew there was nothing he could do. 

"Will?"

Graham snapped up. Molly had sat down again.

"...Let me get the office to make the arrangements. Have you made a reservation already?"

"I didn't use my name. I thought maybe the newspapers..."

"Good. Good. Let me get somebody to see you off. You wouldn't have to board through the gate, and you'd get out of Washington absolutely clean. Can I do that? Let me do that. What time does the plane go?"

"Nine-forty. American 118."

"Okay, eight-thirty...behind the Smithsonian. There's a Park-Rite. Leave the car there. Somebody'll meet you. He'll listen to his watch, put it to his ear when he gets out of his car, okay?"

"That's fine."

Molly reached for Graham's hand, she lifted her other one to his face, her cold fingers met his cheek.  
"I think it's better if you don't see us off. Will, Josh and I are just going to visit his grandparents for...some time. He's excited, we both are. I haven't been there for a long time." 

Silence. 

Then: "Hey. Don't ever forgive me." 

She gave him a chaste kiss on his hair; then left.  
~~~~~~  
Jane was saying goodnight to Crawford in the office when the telephone rang. She put down her purse and umbrella to answer it.

"Special Agent Crawford's office...No, Mr. Graham is not in the office, but let me...Wait, I'll be glad to...Yes, he'll be in tomorrow afternoon, but let me..."

The tone of her voice brought Crawford around his desk.

She held the receiver as though it had died in her hand. "He asked for Will and said he might call back tomorrow afternoon. I tried to  
hold him."

"Who?"

"He said, 'Just tell Graham it's the Pilgrim.' That's what Dr. Lecter called-" 

"The Tooth Fairy," Crawford said.  
~~~~~~  
Graham sat in the restaurant for a long time after Molly and Willy left. He burned for half an hour before going numb. Sometime in between, it had started to rain outside; a thin and miserable drizzle. 

Graham briefly remembered that on the night of Hannibal's attack, it had felt exactly like this. How comical, history repeats itself; his life is in ruins again. 

Graham drove aimlessly before deciding on Crawford's place. He stopped and parked across the street. He sat for a few minutes, still gripping the wheel. 

Molly and Josh caught in the rain, he should have driven them. The thought pounded through Graham's mind. He needed gin.  
~~~~~~  
Crawford had done his best. This was no faceless federal safe house with chair arms bleached by palm sweat. It was a pleasant cottage, freshly whitewashed, with impatiens blooming around the steps. 

It was the product of careful hands and a sense of order. 

The night-duty officer in Washington was glad to make the arrangements for Molly. Graham pressed his face to a window and watched sheets of rain whip over the rear yard, the street leaping from gray to sudden colour in the lightning flashes. His face left a print of forehead, nose, lips, and chin on the glass.

Molly was gone.

The day was over and there was only the night to face, and the aimless parasites in his brain.

Graham filled his glass again and sat at the table by the window, staring at the empty chair across from him. He stared until the space in the opposite chair bore the weight of another man, a familiar figure hidden in the shadows. 

Graham's mind dunked, things crawled around in his head. He tried to make the image coalesce, to see a face. It would not move, had no countenance but, faceless faced him with mocking attention.

"Hello Doctor lector," Graham said. He was intensely drunk. "Are you happy now."

Graham touched his cheek, his fingers came off wet. 

"If you've got to do something, come after me. I don't give a shit. It'll be better after that. Of course, you don't want that do you."

He grabbed something and threw it to the chair, his glass hit the chair and Lecter dissipated into the darkness. 

His empty place immediately assumed a man-shaped swarm filled with dark motes, a presence like a shadow on suspended dust.

Graham took his knees up to his chest.

"I know it's tough," Graham told the Tooth Fairy. "You've got to try to stop, just hold off until we find you." 

"They've got some things now to help you make it stop. To help you stop wanting to so bad. Help me. Help me a little." He leaned across the table, his hand extended to touch, and the presence was gone. 

Graham put his head down on the table, then turned sideways. He could see the print of his forehead, nose, mouth, and chin on the window as the lightning flashed behind it; a face with drops crawling through it down the glass. Eyeless. A face full of rain.

Graham had tried hard to understand the Dragon.

At times, in the breathing silence of the victims' houses, the very spaces the Dragon had moved through tried to speak.

Sometimes Graham felt close to him. A feeling he remembered from other investigations had settled over him in recent days: the taunting sense that he and the Dragon were doing the same things at various times of the day, that there were parallels in the quotidian details of their lives. 

Somewhere the Dragon was eating, or showering, or sleeping at the same time he did.

Graham tried hard to know him. He tried to see him past the blinding glint of slides and vials, beneath the lines of police reports, tried to see his face through the louvres of print. He tried as hard as he knew how, but he needed Lecter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Molly has to go for the rest of the stuff to work out.


	15. Chapter 15

The caller, "Mr. Pilgrim," had said to Jane that he might call again on the following afternoon. At FBI headquarters certain arrangements were made to receive the call.

Who was Mr. Pilgrim? Not Lecter- Crawford had made sure of that. Was Mr. Pilgrim the Tooth Fairy? Maybe so, Crawford thought.

The desks and telephones from Crawford's office had been moved overnight to a larger room across the hall.

Graham leaned on the open doorway of a soundproof booth. He slouched, hands in pockets, head lowered. Crawford worried briefly but did not ask.  
Behind Graham in the booth was a telephone. Jane had cleaned it with Windex. With the voiceprint spectrograph, tape recorders, and stress evaluator taking up most of her desk and another table beside it, and Graham's silent figure. The office reeked of tension.

The big clock on the wall showed ten minutes before noon.

Dr. Alan Bloom and Crawford stood with Graham. They had adopted a protective circle around the man.

A technician seated across from the trio drummed his fingers on the desk until a frown from Crawford stopped him.

Crawford's desk was cluttered with two new telephones, an open line to the Bell System's electronic switching center (ESS) and a hotline to the FBI communications room.

"How much time do you need for a trace?" Dr. Bloom asked.

"With the new switching it's a lot quicker than most people think," Crawford said. "Maybe a minute if it comes through all-electronic switching. More if it's from someplace where they have to swarm the frame."

Crawford raised his voice to the room. "If he calls at all, it'll be short, so let's play him perfect. Want to go over the drill, Will?"

"...Sure. When we get to the point where I talk, I want to ask you a couple of things, Doctor."

Bloom had arrived after the others. He was scheduled to speak to the behavioural- science section at Quantico later in the day. Bloom could smell Graham. Gin masked behind a soap. Vanilla.

"Okay," Graham said as he raised his head. His face was painfully thin. "The phone rings. The circuit's completed immediately and the trace starts at ESS, but the tone generator continues the ringing noise so he doesn't know we've picked up. That gives us about twenty seconds on him." He pointed to the technician. "Tone generator to 'off' at the end of the fourth ring, got it?"

The technician nodded. "End of the fourth ring."

"Now, Jane picks up the phone. He asks for me. Jane says, 'I'll have to page him, may I put you on hold?' Ready with that, Jane?" 

Graham thought it would be better not to rehearse the lines. They might sound flat by rote.

"All right, the line is open to us, dead to him. I think he'll hold longer than he'll talk." 

"Sure you don't want to give him the hold music?" the technician asked.

"Hell no," Crawford said.

"We give him about twenty seconds of hold, then Beverly comes back on and tells him, 'Mr. Graham's coming to the phone, I'll connect you now.' I pick up." Graham turned to Dr. Bloom. "How would you play him, Doctor?"

"He'll expect you to be skeptical about it really being him. I'd give him some polite skepticism. I'd make a strong distinction between the nuisance of fake callers and the significance, the importance, of a call from the real person. The fakes are easy to recognize because they lack the capacity to understand what has happened, that sort of thing.  
"Make him tell something to prove who he is." Dr. Bloom looked spoke slowly and observed Graham.

"You don't know what he wants. Maybe he wants to understand, maybe he's fixed on you as the adversary and wants to gloat- we'll see. Try to pick up his mood and give him what he's after, a little at a time. I'd be very leery of appealing to him to come to us for help unless you sense he's asking for that.

"If he's paranoid you'll pick it up fast. In that case, I'd play into his suspicion or grievance. Let him air it. If he gets rolling on that, he may forget how long he's talked. That's all I know to tell you." Bloom put his hand on Graham's shoulder and spoke quietly. "Listen, this is not a pep talk or any bullshit; you can take him over the jumps. Never mind advice, do what seems right to you."

Waiting. Half an hour of silence was enough.

"Call or no call, we've got to decide where to go from here," Crawford said. "Want to try the mail drop?"

"I can't see anything better," Graham said.

"That would give us two baits, a stakeout at your house in the Keys and the drop."

The telephone was ringing.

Tone generator on. At ESS the trace began. Four rings. The technician hit the switch and Jane picked up.  
"Special Agent Crawford's office."

Crawford shook his head. Graham knew the caller, one of Crawford's cronies at Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Jane got him off in a hurry and stopped the trace. Everyone in the FBI building knew to keep the line clear.

Crawford went over the details of the mail drop again. They were bored and tense at the same time. Lloyd Bowman came around to show them how the number pairs in Lecter's Scriptures fit page 100 of the softcover Joy of Cooking. Sarah passed around coffee in paper cups.

The telephone was ringing.

The tone generator took over and at ESS the trace began. Four rings. The technician hit the switch. Jane picked up.  
"Special Agent Crawford's office." She waited then nodded.

Graham went into his booth and closed the door. He could see Jane's lips moving. She punched "Hold" and watched the second hand on the wall clock.

Graham could see his face in the polished receiver. Sunken and pale in the earpiece and mouthpiece. He could smell last night's drink on his shirt. Don't hang up. Sweet Jesus, don't hang up. Forty seconds had elapsed. The telephone moved slightly to his table when it rang. 

Let it ring. Once more. Forty-five seconds. Now. "This is Will Graham, can I help you?"

Low laughter. A muffled voice: "I expect you can."

"Could I ask who's calling please?"

"Didn't your secretary tell you?"

"No, but she did call me out of a meeting, sir, and-"

"If you tell me you won't talk to Mr. Pilgrim, I'll hang up right now. Yes or no?"

"Mr. Pilgrim, if you have some problem I'm equipped to deal with, I'll be glad to talk with you."

"I think you have the problem, Mr. Graham."

"I'm sorry, I didn't understand you."

The second hand crawled toward one minute.

"You've been a busy boy, haven't you?" the caller said.

"Too busy to stay on the phone unless you state your business."

"My business is in the same place yours is. Atlanta and Birmingham." 

"Do you know something about that?"

Soft laughter. "Know something about it? Are you interested in Mr. Pilgrim? Yes or no. I'll hang up if you lie."

Graham could see Crawford through the glass. He had a telephone receiver in each hand.

"Yes. But, see, I get a lot of calls, and most of them are from people who say they know things." One minute.

Crawford put one receiver down and scrawled on a piece of paper. "You'd be surprised how many pretenders there are," Graham said. "Talk to them a few minutes and you can tell they don't have the capacity to even understand what's going on. Do you?"

Jane held a sheet of paper to the glass for Graham to see. It said, "Chicago phone booth. PD scrambling."

"I'll tell you what, you tell me one thing you know about Mr. Pilgrim and maybe I'll tell you whether you're right or not," the muffled voice said.

"Let's get straight who we're talking about," Graham said.

"We're talking about Mr. Pilgrim."

"How do I know Mr. Pilgrim has done anything I'm interested in. Has he?"

"Let's say, yes."

"Are you Mr. Pilgrim?"

"I don't think I'll tell you that."

"Are you his friend?"

"Sort of."

"Well, prove it then. Tell me something that shows me how well you know him."

"You first. You show me yours." A nervous giggle. "First time you're wrong, I hang up."

"All right, Mr. Pilgrim is right-handed." "That's a safe guess. Most people are." "Mr. Pilgrim is misunderstood."

"No general crap, please."

"Mr. Pilgrim is really strong physically." 

"Yes, you could say that."

Graham looked at the clock. A minute and a half. Crawford nodded encouragement.

Don't tell him anything that he could change.

"Mr. Pilgrim is white and about, say, five-feet-eleven. You haven't told me anything, you know. I'm not so sure you even know him at all."

"Want to stop talking?"

"No, but you said we'd trade. I was just going along with you." "Do you think Mr. Pilgrim is crazy?"

Bloom was shaking his head.

"I don't think anybody who is as careful as he is could be crazy. I think he's different. I think a lot of people do believe he's crazy, and the reason for that is, he hasn't let people understand much about him."

"Describe exactly what you think he did to Mrs. Leeds and maybe I'll tell you if you're right or not."

"I don't want to do that"

"Good-bye."

Graham's heart jumped, but he could still hear breathing on the other end. "I can't go into that until I know-"

Graham heard the telephone-booth door slam open in Chicago and the receiver fall with a clang. Faint voices and bangs as the receiver swung on its cord. Everyone in the office heard it on the speakerphone.  
"  
Freeze. Don't even twitch. Now lock your fingers behind your head and back out of the booth slowly. Slowly. Hands on the glass and spread 'em."

Sweet relief was flooding Graham.

"I'm not armed, Stan. You'll find my ID in my breast pocket. That tickles."

A confused voice was loud on the telephone. "Who am I speaking to?"

"Will Graham, FBI."

"This is Sergeant Stanley Riddle, Chicago police department." Irritated now. "Would you tell me what the hell's going on?"

"You tell me. You have a man in custody?"

"Damn right. Freddy Lounds, the reporter. I've known him for ten years... Here's your notebook, Freddy... Are you preferring charges against him?"

Graham's face paled to a stark white. Crawford's was red. Dr. Bloom watched the tape reels go around.

"Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I'm preferring charges." Graham's voice was strangled. "Obstruction of justice. Please take him in and hold him for the U.S attorney."

Suddenly Lounds was on the telephone. He spoke fast and clearly with the cotton-wads out of his cheeks.

"Will, listen-"

"Tell it to the U.S. attorney. Put Sergeant Riddle on the phone."

"I know something-"

"Sergent Riddle please."

Crawford's voice came on the line. "Let me have it' Will."

Graham placed his receiver down gently, but everyone in range of the speakerphone flinched. He came out of the booth and left the room without looking at anyone.

"Lounds, you have hubbed hell, my man," Crawford said.

"You want to catch him or not? I can help you. Let me talk one minute." Lounds hurried into Crawford's silence. "Listen, you just showed me how bad you need the Tattler. Before I wasn't sure- now, I am. That ad's part of the Tooth Fairy case or you wouldn't have gone balls-out to nail this call. Great. The Tattler's here for you. Anything you want."

"How did you find out?"

"The ad manager came to me. Said your Chicago office sent this suit-of-clothes over to check the ads. Your guy took five letters from the incoming ads. Said it was 'pursuant to mail fraud.' Mail fraud nothing. The ad manager made Xerox copies of the letters and envelopes before he let your guy have them.

"I looked them over. I knew he took five letters to smokescreen the one he really wanted. Took a day or two to check them all out. The answer was on the envelope. Chesapeake postmark. The postage-meter number was for Chesapeake State Hospital. I was over there you know, behind your psycho dog. What else could it be?

"I had to be sure, though. That's why I called to see if you'd come down on 'Mr. Pilgrim' with both feet, and you did."

"You made a huge mistake Freddy."

"You need the Tattler and l can open it up for you. Ads, editorial, monitoring incoming mail, anything. You name it. I can be discreet. I can. Cut me in, Crawford."

"There's nothing to cut you in on."

"Okay, then it won't make any difference if somebody happened to put in six personal ads next issue. All to 'Mr. Pilgrim' and signed the same way."

"I'll get an injunction slapped on you and a sealed indictment for obstruction of justice." 

"And it might leak to every paper in the country." Lounds knew he was talking on tape. He didn't care anymore. "I swear to God I'll do it, Crawford. I'll tear up your chance before I lose mine."

"Add interstate transmission of a threatening message to what I just said."

"Let me help you, Jack. I can, believe me."

"Run along to the police station, Freddy. Now put the sergeant back on the phone."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should Freddy live or die?


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now is when things begin to escalate. Everything before was just buffer.

Dr. Alan Bloom and Jack Crawford sat on leather sofas, the only furniture left in Crawford’s office.

“The cupboard is bare, Doctor.”

Dr. Bloom studied Crawford’s simian face and wondered what was coming.

Behind Crawford’s grousing and his Alka-Seltzers, the doctor saw intelligence as cold as an X-ray table.

“Where did Will go?”

“He’ll walk around and cool off,” Crawford said. “He hates Lounds.”

“Did you think you might lose Will after Lecter published his home address? That he might go back to his family?”

“For a minute, I did. It shook him.”

“Understandably,” Dr. Bloom said.

“Then I realized – he can’t go home, and neither can Molly and Willy, never, until the Tooth Fairy is out of the way.”

"You’ve met Molly?”

"Yeah. She’s great, I like her. She’d be glad to see me in hell with my back broken, of course. I’m having to duck her right now.”

Crawford lit a cigarette cooly.

“Do you think you use Will?”

Crawford looked at Dr. Bloom sharply. “I’ve got some things I have to talk to him about. We’ll need to check with you. When do you have to be at Quantico?”

“Not until Tuesday morning. I put it off.” Dr. Bloom was a guest lecturer at the behavioural-science section of the FBI Academy.

“Graham likes you. He doesn’t think you run any mind games on him,” Crawford said. They've run this routine many times. Bloom makes an edgy remark; Crawford bites back. They chew each other up.

“I don’t. I wouldn’t try,” Dr. Bloom said. “I’m as honest with him as I’d be with a patient.”

“Exactly.”

“No, I want to be his friend, and I am. Jack, I owe it to my field of study to observe. Remember, though, when you asked me to give you a study on him, I refused.”

“That was Petersen, upstairs, wanted the study.”

“You were the one who asked for it. No matter, if I ever did anything on Graham, if there were ever anything that might be of therapeutic benefit to others, I’d abstract it in a form that would be totally unrecognizable. If I ever do anything in a scholarly way, it’ll only be published posthumously.”

“After you or after Graham?”

Dr. Bloom sighed. He didn’t answer.

“One thing I’ve noticed- I’m curious about this: you’re never alone in a room with Graham, are you? You’re smooth about it, but you’re never one-on-one with him. Why’s that? Do you think he’s psychic, is that it?”

“No. He’s an eideteker- he has a remarkable visual memory- but I don’t think he’s psychic. He wouldn’t let people him- that doesn’t mean anything, though. He hates to be prodded and poked. So do I.”

“But-“

“Will wants to think of this as purely an intellectual exercise, and in the narrow definition of forensics, that’s what it is. He’s good at that, but there are other people just as good, I imagine.”

“Not many,” Crawford said.

“What he has, in addition, is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view or mine- and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”

"Did Lecter tell you that?"

Bloom sighed again. "Why would I ever-"

“Alright, alright. Why aren’t you ever alone with him?”

“Because I have some professional curiosity about him and he’d pick that up in a hurry. He’s fast.”

“If he caught you peeking, he’d snatch down the shades.”

“An unpleasant analogy, but accurate, yes. You’ve had sufficient revenge now, Jack. We can get to the point. Let’s make it short. I don’t feel very well.”

“A psychosomatic manifestation, probably,” Crawford said. 

“Actually it’s my gallbladder. What do you want?”

“I have a medium where I can speak to the Tooth Fairy.”

“The Tattler,” Dr. Bloom said.

“Right. Do you think there’s any way to push him in a self-destructive way by what we say to him?”

“Push him toward suicide?”

“Suicide would suit me fine.”

“I doubt it. In certain kinds of mental illness that might be possible. Here, I doubt it. If he were self-destructive, he wouldn’t be so careful. He wouldn’t protect himself so well. If he were a classic paranoid schizophrenic, you might be able to influence him to blow up and become visible. You might even get him to hurt himself. I wouldn’t help you though.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” Crawford said. “Could we enrage him?”

“Why do you want to know? To what purpose?”

“Let me ask you this: could we enrage him and focus his attention?”

“He’s already fixed on Graham as his adversary, and you know it. Don’t fool around. You’ve decided to stick Graham’s neck out, haven’t you?”

"The hell do you mean by that?"

"You're quite cruel, Jack." 

“Fine. But I think I have to do it. It’s that or he gets his feet sticky on the 25th. Help me.”

“I’m not sure you know what you’re asking.”

“Advice- that’s what I’m asking.”

“I don’t mean from me,” Dr. Bloom said. “What you’re asking from Graham. I don’t want you to misinterpret this, and normally I wouldn’t say it, but you ought to know: what do you think one of Will’s strongest drives is?”

Crawford shook his head. 

“It’s fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.” 

“Because Lecter cut him?”

“No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

Crawford stared at his blunt hands folded on his stomach. “Sure. It’s what you don’t ever mention on the big boys’ side of the playground, right? Don’t worry about telling me he’s afraid. I don't think he’s not a ‘stand-up guy.’ I’m not a total asshole, Doctor.”

“I never thought you were.”

“I wouldn’t put him out there if I couldn’t cover him. Okay, if I couldn’t cover him eighty percent. He’s not bad himself, hesitant, but he’s quick. You gonna help us stir up the Tooth Fairy, Doctor? A lot of people are dead.”

“Only if Graham knows the entire risk ahead of time and assumes it voluntarily. I have to hear him say that.”

“I’m like you, Doctor. I never bullshit him. No more than we all bullshit each other.”  
~~~~~~  
Crawford found Graham in the small workroom near Zeller's lab which he had commandeered and filled with photographs and personal papers belonging to the victims.

Crawford waited until Graham put down the Law Enforcement Bulletin he was reading.

"Let me fill you in on what's up for the 25th," He did not have to tell Graham that the 25th would bring the next full moon.

"When he does it again?"

"Yeah, if we have a problem on the 25th." 

"Not if. When."

"Both times it's been on Saturday night. Birmingham, June 28th, a full moon falling on a Saturday night. It was July 26th in Atlanta, that's one day short of a full moon, but also Saturday night. This time the full moon falls on Monday, August 25th. He likes the weekend, though, so we're ready from Friday on."

"Ready? We're ready?"  
"Correct. You know how it is in the textbooks- the ideal way to investigate a homicide?"

"I never saw it done that way," Graham said. "It never works out like that."

"No. Hardly ever. It would be great to be able to do it, though: Send one guy in. Just one. Let him go over the place. He's wired and dictating all the time. He gets the place absolutely cherry for as long as he needs. Just him...just you."

A long silence.

"What are you telling me, Jack?"

"Starting the night of Friday, the twenty-second, we have a Grumman Gulfstream standing by at Andrews Air Force Base. I borrowed it from the Interior. The basic lab stuff will be on it. We stand by - me, you, Zeller, Jimmy Price, a photographer, and two people to do interrogations. Soon as the call comes in, we're on our way."  
Anywhere in the East or South, we can be there in an hour and fifteen minutes."

"What about the locals? They don't have to cooperate. They won't wait."

"We're blanketing the chiefs of police and sheriffs' departments. Every one of them. We're asking orders to be posted on the dispatchers' consoles and the duty officers' desks."

Graham shook his head. "They'd never hold off. They couldn't."

"This is what we're asking- it's not so much. We're asking that when a report comes in, the first officers at the scene go in and look. Medical personnel go in and make sure nobody's left alive. They come back out. Roadblocks, interrogations, go on any way they like, but the scene, that's sealed off until we get there. We drive up, you go in. You're wired. You talk it out to us when you feel like it, don't say anything when you don't feel like it. Take as long as you want. Then we'll come in."

"The locals won't wait."

"Of course they won't. They'll send in some guys from Homicide. But the request will have some effect. It'll cut down on traffic in there, and you'll get it fresh."

Fresh. Graham tilted his head back against his chair and stared at the ceiling.

"Of course," Crawford said, "we've still got thirteen days before that weekend." 

"Aw, Jack."

"'Jack' what?" Crawford said.

"You kill me, you really do."

"I don't follow you."

"Yes, you do. What you've done, you've decided to use me for bait because you don't have anything else. So before you pop the question, you pump me up about how bad next time will be. Not bad at all, not bad psychology.   
To use on a fucking idiot.   
What did you think I'd say? You worried I don't have it in me. Since that with Lecter?"

Crawford watched Graham close his eyes.

"No."

"I wouldn't blame you for wondering. We both know people it happened to. I don't like walking around in a Kevlar vest with my neck out. But hell, I'm in it now..."

If Graham were a regular agent, Crawford would have threatened him with a lifetime appointment to the Aleutians. Instead he said:   
“My brother called this afternoon. Molly left, he said.”

Graham lowered his head immediately.

“Yeah.”

“Someplace safe, I guess?”

Graham was confident Crawford knew exactly where she went, he had a habit of stalking Graham's purchases. 

“Willy’s grandparents.”

“Well, they’ll be glad to see the kid.” Crawford waited.

No comment from Graham.

“Everything’s okay, I hope.”

“I’m working, Jack. Don’t worry about it. No, look, it’s just that she got jumpy over there.”

"...I'm sorry man, I really am. I never doubted you'd do it," Crawford shuffled over hesitantly. he raised his hand and allowed it to linger for a few seconds before patting Graham twice.

Graham felt a distinct ache in his stomach, a sudden linkage to Molly's loathing of Jack Crawford. "...It's something more, isn't it?"

Crawford retracted his hand shamefully and said nothing.

Graham turned his head to stare at him for a moment. "Oh, for Christ's sake, Jack. You've decided to play ball with Freddy Lounds, haven't you? You and little Freddy have cut a deal."

Crawford frowned at Graham's loose tie. He pulled up a chair to sit beside him. "You know yourself it's the best way to bait him. The Tooth Fairy's gonna watch the Tattler. What else have we got?"

"It has to be Lounds doing it?"

"He's got the corner on the Tattler."

"So I really bad-mouth the Tooth Fairy in the Tattler and then we give him a shot. Do you think it's better than the mail drop? Don't answer that, I know it is. You talked to Bloom about it right?"

"Just in passing. We'll both get together with him. And Lounds. We'll run the mail drop on him at the same time."

"What about the setup? I think we'll have to give him a pretty good shot at it. Something open. Someplace where he can get close. I don't think he'd snipe. He might fool me, but I can't see him with a rifle."

"We'll have still watchers on the high places."

They were both thinking the same thing. Kevlar body armour would stop the Tooth Fairy's nine-millimetre and his knife unless Graham got hit in the face. There was no way to protect him against a headshot if a hidden rifleman got the chance to fire.

"You talk to Lounds. I don't have to do that."

"He needs to interview you, Will," Crawford tried gently. "He has to take your picture."

Bloom had warned Crawford he'd have trouble on that point.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, I'm gonna post one more chapter and then just go back to rewrite some of the old chapters since I'm not really satisfied with how they came out. Sorry if you were expecting more chapters. Re-reading the old ones after I edit them would be cool cause they'll probably be a lot more different. Thanks for understanding.

When the time came, Graham surprised both Crawford and Bloom. He didn't seem willing to meet Lounds but his expression was blank beneath cold blue eyes. 

Being inside FBI headquarters had a salutary effect on Lounds's manners. He was polite when he remembered to be, and he was quick and quiet with his equipment.

Graham balked only once: he flatly refused to let Lounds see Mrs. Leeds's diary or any of the families' private correspondence.

When the interview began, he answered Lounds's questions monotonously. Both men consulted notes taken in the conference with Dr. Bloom. Graham rephrased many of Lound's reports.  
~~~~~~  
In the interview with Lounds, Graham made statements no investigator would make and no straight newspaper would credit.

He speculated that the Tooth Fairy was ugly, sexually impotent, and he claimed falsely that the killer had molested his underage victims. Graham said that the Tooth Fairy doubtless was the laughingstock of his acquaintances and the product of an incestuous home.

He emphasized that the Tooth Fairy obviously was not as intelligent as Hannibal Lecter. He promised to provide the Tattler with more observations and insights about the killer as they occurred to him. Many law-enforcement people disagreed with him, he said, but as long as he was heading the investigation, the Tattler could count on getting the straight stuff from him.

Lounds took an excessive amount of pictures.

The key shot was taken in Graham's "Washington hideaway," an apartment he had "borrowed to use until he squashed the Fairy." It was the only place where he could "find solitude" in the "carnival atmosphere" of the investigation.

The photograph showed Graham at a desk, the fluorescence of his only lamp revealed his thin figure in a loose shirt. He was poring over white documents in brown folders. Behind him, a slice of the floodlit Capitol dome could be seen through the window. Most importantly, in the lower-left corner of the window, blurred but readable, was the sign of a popular motel across the street.

The Tooth Fairy could find the apartment if he wanted to.

At FBI headquarters, Graham was photographed in front of a mass spectrometer. It had nothing to do with the case, but Lounds thought it looked impressive.

Graham even consented to have his picture taken with Lounds interviewing him. They did it in front of the vast gun racks in Firearms and Toolmarks. Lounds held a nine-millimetre automatic of the same type as the Tooth Fairy's weapon. Dr. Bloom was surprised that Lounds placed a hand over Graham's shoulder just before Crawford clicked the shutter.

The interview and pictures were set to appear in the Tattler published the next day, Monday, August 11th. As soon as he had the material, Lounds left for Chicago. He said he wanted to supervise the layout himself. He made arrangements to meet Crawford on Tuesday afternoon five blocks from the trap.

Starting Tuesday, when the Tattler became generally available, two traps would be baited for the monster.

Graham would go each evening to his "temporary residence" shown in the Tattler picture.

A coded personal notice in the same issue invited the Tooth Fairy to a mail drop in Annapolis watched around the clock. If he were suspicious of the mail drop, he might think the effort to catch him was concentrated there. Then Graham would be a more appealing target, the FBI reasoned.

Florida authorities provided a still watch at Sugarloaf Key.

There was an air of dissatisfaction among the hunters- two major stakeouts took manpower that could be used elsewhere, and Graham's presence at the trap each night would limit his movement to the Washington area.

Though Crawford's judgment told him this was the best move, the whole procedure was too passive for his taste. He felt they were playing games with themselves in the dark of the moon with less than two weeks to go before it rose full again.

Sunday and Monday passed in curiously jerky time. The minutes dragged and the hours flew.  
~~~~~~  
Spurgeon, the chief SWAT instructor at Quantico, circled the apartment block on Monday afternoon. Graham rode beside him. Crawford was in the back seat.

"The pedestrian traffic falls off around seven-fifteen. Everybody's settled in for dinner," Spurgeon said. With his wiry, compact body and his baseball cap tipped back on his head, he looked comical against Graham's wiry frame. "Give us a toot on the clear band tomorrow night when you cross the B&O railroad tracks. You ought to try to make it about eight-thirty, eight-forty or so."

He pulled into the apartment parking lot. "This setup ain't heaven, but it could be worse. You'll park here tomorrow night. We'll change the space you use every night after that, but it'll always be on this side. It's seventy-five yards to the apartment entrance. Let's walk it."

Spurgeon, tall and bandy-legged, went ahead of Graham and Crawford.

He's looking for places where he could get the bad hop, Graham thought.

"The walk is probably where it'll happen, if it happens," the SWAT leader said. "See, from here the direct line from your car to the entrance, the natural route, is across the center of the lot. It's as far as you can get from the line of cars that are here all day. He'll have to come across open asphalt to get close. How well do you hear?"

"Pretty well," Graham said. "Well on this parking lot."

Spurgeon looked for something in Graham's face, found nothing he could recognize.

He stopped in the middle of the lot. "We're reducing the wattage on these streetlights a little to make it tougher on a rifleman."

"Tougher on your people too," Crawford said.

"Two of ours have Startron night scopes," Spurgeon said. "I've got some clear spray I'll ask you to use on your suit jackets, special investigator Graham. I don't care how hot it is, you will wear body armour each and every time. Correct?"

"Yes."

"What type you got?"

"It's Kevlar- what, Jack?- Second Chance?" 

"Second Chance," Crawford said.

"It's pretty likely he'll come up to you, probably from behind, or he may figure on meeting you and then turning around to shoot when he's passed you," Spurgeon said. "Seven times he's gone for the headshot, right? He's seen that work. He'll do it with you too if you give him the time. Don't give him the time. After I show you a couple of things in the lobby and the flop, let's go to the range. Can you do that?"

"He can do that," Crawford said.

Spurgeon was a high priest on the range. He made Graham wear earplugs under the earmuffs and flashed targets at him from every angle. He was relieved to see that Graham did not carry the regulation .38, but he worried about the flash from the ported barrel. They worked for two hours. The man insisted on checking the cylinder crane and cylinder latch screws on Graham's .44 when he had finished firing.

Graham showered and changed clothes to get the smell of cordite off him before he drove to Chesapeake Asylum for the Criminally Insane.  
~~~~~~  
"Hello, Dr. Lecter."

"Good afternoon, Will. So nice of you to visit again."

This story of the asylum was airy and cold. Graham shivered as he took files out of his folder and showed them to Lecter. Taking care to not press on the bristles between them.

"He carved this on a tree near the Jacobi house. With a linoleum knife. The same one later used on Charles Leeds."

"Umm-hmm, a good choice. Take a walk with me."

Lecter, in his prisoner's Jumpsuit, walks briskly as he examines, with mild interest, a photo of the curious symbol. It's startling to see the Doctor, to feel his presence, his uniform was crisp, not a fold out of place, not a wrinkle to be seen. Graham shivered again.

"He had a second tool, too. A bolt cutter. He used that to clear his view."

When Lecter had reached the end of the asphalt pad, he turned neatly, without looking up- years of practice- and starts Back in the other direction. He was fenced in a long, narrow pen like a dog runner with high, heavy electric barriers. At one end, a closed steel hatch led back into the asylum.

Graham, outside the pen, has to walk quickly to keep up with the Doctor's pace.

"But?" Lecter stops suddenly and Graham swerves to prevent himself from electrocution. 

"...I don't think that was what he brought it for. It's too heavy. Too awkward. And he had to carry it a long way."

"Umm-hmm, would you slide those through, Will?" Graham knelt down on his knees to push a clip of documents through an opening between flooring and fence. He looked up to meet the doctor's pitiful gaze, and faint sneer. 

"My poor, sweet Will, you'll surely die in this pilgrim's hands if you are willing to stoop for me."

"...I-" Lecter quickly interrupts Graham with a curt clap. "I don't care about your redemption. Now reach up, will you? I refuse to bend down."

He resumes striding while holding up the photo. "And what do we make of that symbol?"

"I'm stumped, doctor. Any thoughts?"

Lecter twists around suddenly, he smiles dryly. "Do you take me for a child, Will? Do you think I'm simple?"

"No, I-"

"Have you been seeing me in your dreams, Will?"

"If you waste my time I'll leave doctor."

Lecter moved coyly, his head hung slightly right like a curious bird. "So Leave." 

Graham bites his lower lip. The doctor was now directly in front of him. The shadows of his cage demonic against his face.

"You cannot leave me, Will. So behave."

A long silence. 

"...Asian Studies at Langley identified it as a Chinese character. It appears on a mah-jong piece. It marks the Red Dragon."

"Red Dragon. Correct. This boy begins to interest me."

"Doctor, we don't know what greater meaning this symbol might have for him. If you could-"

"Do you like my little exercise cage, Will? My so-called lawyer is always nagging Dr. Chilton for better accommodations. I don't know which is the greater fool."

"Perhaps if you could offer some insight into-"

"'A robin redbreast in a cage puts all Heaven in a rage.' Ever been a redbreast, Will? Of course, you have." Dr. Lecter stops abruptly again. "I'm only allowed twenty minutes out here once a week. Get to the point."

Graham tastes blood in his mouth.

"He, he meant to use the bolt cutter to enter the house...but he didn't. Instead, he broke in through the patio doors. The noise woke Jacobi, and he had to shoot him on the stairs. That wasn't planned. It was sloppy. And that isn't like him."

Lecter closed his eyes and leaned forward to sniff. Graham resisted the urge to bolt and held his stance. 

"We mustn't judge too harshly, Will. I was also quit impetuous my first time. Have you ever felt a sudden rush of panic?" Dr. Lecter leans even further, his face inches from Graham.

"...Yes."

Graham is pinned by his gaze. The steel mesh between them suddenly seems very flimsy. Lecter's voice is rapid, harsh.

"It takes the experience to master it. You sensed who I was... Back when I was committing what you call my 'crimes.'"

"Yes."

"So you were hurt not by a fault in your perception or your instincts; but because you failed to act on them until it was too late. Dr. Lecter tilted his head to the left this time. "Your deformed trust," he whispered. "But you're wiser now. Imagine what you would do, Will, if you could go back in time."

Graham stepped back and lowered his head.

"Put two in your head before you could have your way."

"Very good, Will. You know, I believe we're making progress. And that's what our pilgrim is doing. He is refining his methods. He is evolving." Behind them, the deep rasp of the steel sounds as the hatch slides up. Graham turns his head to look then back at Lecter, whose pale eyes have never left his. "The case file mentioned videos of the Leeds family. I'd like to see those."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I think you know."

"You don't make it easy, do you? Still, one aims to please. I'll call you now that I have your number; you surprise me, Will. I didn't think you would be back so soon, especially after my little gift."

Graham watched the steel hatch rise to its hilt.

"I that's the end of our session doctor" 

"For now."

"I don't think I'll have time to see you anymore."

"Oh, what a shame. But I do, I have oodles. Perhaps I'll visit you sometime."  
Lecter raised the photo that he had held on. "This was only his first time." He waved it in front of Graham's face. "Already in Atlanta, he did much better- Rest assured, my dear Will, rest assured, this one will give you plenty of exercises." The doctor pauses to give a toothy smile before pressing the print into the wires. There were small blue flashes until it burst into flame.

Graham jerked back. Lecter dropped the burning 中.  
"My love to Molly and Josh, goodbye little robin."


	18. Chapter 18

Hannibal Lecter stood in the darkness of his cell, he preferred no light at all next to artificial. the faint howls and muffled screaming down the unit were always amplified by Lecter's supreme hearing. Alas, all things godly came with a price. And by Lecter's definition, most were not blessed with these gifts, however, some were; Will Graham is one of those people. 

But while Lecter chose to exercise his gifts by ridding the world of odious vermin; Will Graham wallowed in misery. 

Lecter licked his lips. 

Suddenly, he could taste something...Blood...Sinewy flesh. Something sweet, not hot nor cold. It was warm, a quenching nectar. Will Graham. 

Oh, a realization. Hannibal Lecter had developed an erection.

How embarrassing. But how could he resist? Running his hands down that tear-stricken face, smearing maroon droplets over his lips. Yessum. delicious. 

Hannibal Lecter laughed in the darkness of his cell. He was soon joined by Miggs. His lovely neighbour a dozen or so steel slates down. The lumbering swine spent his temps libre banging around his cell and defecating anywhere but his privy. 

Lecter could not fathom why Chilton thought Miggs less of a nuisance than him. 

Miggs laughed maniacally, then began shrieking. It was not long before staff intercepted; which only caused him to start his usual vulgar slander. 

Lecter often listened against his will, but this time Miggs' cussing warranted some mild interest. 

The orderlies had disturbed Migg's inherent masturbation session. The new disinfectant had intercepted with Lecter's sense of smell but he could detect it now. Fresh, spewed in an indecent rage. Billions of follicles of potential life swept away by a mop- deformed and incestuous- but life nonetheless. 

Lecter breathed in and in one holding turned on all his lights before releasing. 

Basking, eyes closed, in cheap fluorescence, Lecter thought that, undoubtedly, Miggs had developed an affinity for Will Graham. After all, the man had to pass Miggs' cell to get to Lecter. 

Ah yes, most do. People loved watching disasters. Alan Bloom sure did, Crawford...Oh! And his "avid fan".

Lecter laughed heartily in his illuminated cell. Then he sat down and began to write.  
~~~~~~  
Dr. Frederick Chilton stood in the corridor outside Hannibal Lecter's cell. With Chilton were three large orderlies. One carried a straitjacket and leg restraints and another held a can of Mace. The third loaded a tranquillizer dart into his air rifle.

Lecter was flipping through a notebook at his table and taking notes. He had heard the footsteps coming. He heard the rifle breech close behind him, but he continued on and gave no sign that he knew Chilton was there.

Chilton had sent him the newspapers at noon and let him wait until night to find out his punishment for helping the Dragon.

"Dr. Lecter," Chilton said.

Lecter turned around. "Good evening, Dr. Chilton." He didn't acknowledge the presence of the guards. He looked only at Chilton.

"I've come for your books. All your books."

"I see. May I ask how long you intend to keep them?"

"That depends on your attitude."

"Is this your decision?"

"I decide the punitive measures here."

"Of course you do. It's not the sort of thing Will Graham would request."

"No, his punishment for you is that he'll never see you again. Back up to the net and slip these on, Dr. Lecter. I won't ask you twice."

Dr. Lecter smiled, his eyes trained on Chilton's balding scalp.

"Certainly, Dr. Chilton. I hope that's a thirty-nine - the thirty-seven are snug around the chest."

Dr. Lecter put on the restraints as though they were dinner clothes. An orderly reached through the barrier and fastened them from the back.

"Help him to his cot," Chilton said.

While the orderlies stripped the bookshelves, Chilton polished his glasses and stirred Lecter's personal papers with a pen.

Lecter watched from the shadowed corner of his cell. There was a curious grace about him, even in restraints.

"Beneath the yellow folder," Lecter said quietly, "you'll find a rejection slip the Archives sent you. It was brought to me by mistake with some of my Archives mail, and I'm afraid I opened it without looking at the envelope. Sorry."

Chilton reddened. He spoke to an orderly. "I think you'd better take one of Dr. Lecter's pens."

Chilton looked at the actuarial table. Lecter had written his age at the top: forty-one. "And what do you have here?" Chilton asked.  
"Time," Dr. Lecter said. Time and plans. Wonderful plans.


End file.
